[gothic-l] Gothic influence on Baltic Prussians

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Dirk wrote :

>So, if Wolfram is correct
>and the Goths dominated the (proto-)Prussian Galindi etc. the
>Prussians may have borrowed words from them, while the influence of
>Baltic on Gothic may have remained small. But these are just guesses.

Lehmann's Gothic dictionary gives a list of 230 Old Prussian words
that have counterparts in Gothic. So maybe this tells us something
about how much the Prussians influenced Gothic.

I looked at one instance of Gothic taking up foreign words the other
day. This was Wulfila's use of the word "gaiainna" in his Bible
translation. Here he simply took the Greek *) word gamma-epsilon-
epsilon-nu-nu-alpha and created a new Gotic word that corresponded to it.
[funny why he chose the diphtong(?) "ai" for a Greek epsilon btw -
maybe this tells us something about Gothic phonetics - anyone any
comments?]

*) The Greek word is of course in its turn a Hebrew loan word.


But whether Lehmann's list of 230 Old Prussian words tells us
that these were absorbed from Old Prussian into Gothic, I
doubt (see Lehmann, page 575). Some of them, such
as 'catils' were no doubt borrowed from Latin into both Old
Prussian as well as Gothic. Whether the word then came into
Old Prussian via Gothic, or vice versa, might be impossible to
answer. To me it seems likely the Latin word was borrowed
independently by both.

Another Old Prussian word from Lehmann's list is "percunis"
(thunder), which is found in the main body of Lehmann's dictionary
as "fairguni" (mountain), and was used by Wulfila as translation
of Greek "óros" (see Luke 4-29 & 19-37; in the last instance it
is the "Mount of Olives" that is being mentioned).

And so I am not sure how suitable Lehmann's list is as an
aid to determining how Gothic influenced Old Prussian.
I have mentioned it because his list does deserve a closer look.
Perhaps someone more knowledgable than I could then find better
examples among these 230 words. How many words are known of
Old Prussian? Does Wolfram give any information?

Best regards
Keth




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