[gothic-l] Re: Gothic and Old Bavarian

[Francisc Czobor]

Hi Cory,

first, thank you very much for your kind appreciation (in the P.S.)!
And thank you also for your very interresting information about
mota/Maut.
Regarding the Slavic word myto, I think it could be borrowed from
Gothic. Many of the Germanic loanwords in Slavic appear to be from
Gothic, explainable not only through neighborhoood, but also through
the fact that at a moment (in the time of Ermanaric) the Slavs were
subjects of the Goths.
One questions: what do you mean by "consonantal  changes that had
affected the Italian branch" ?
Because the Ostrogothic language of Italy was NOT affected by the
second (High German) consonant shift. In fact, this is one of the
criteria for deciding if an Italian word of Germanic origin comes from
Ostrogothic or from Langobardic: if it shows the second consonant
shift, than it's Langobardic, and if not, than it's Ostrogothic (cf.
Carlo Tagliavini - "Le Origine delle lingue neolatine" (Ed. VI),
Bologna, 1972).

With best regards,

Francisc

--- In gothic-l at y..., cstrohmier at y... wrote:
> Hi Francisc,
> 	Below you mentioned the Gothic word "mota," meaning "tax."
> In the book "A History of the German Language" by John T. Waterman
> there is some interesting information about this word in footnote
#12
> on page 61:
>
> 	"The OHG (Bavarian-Austrian) word mauta, Modern German
> Maut "tax, revenue," offers evidence of a possible exception to this
> statement.  A loanword from Gothic (compare biblical Gothic
> mota "tax"), mauta would seem to point to an unshifted dental stop
> rather than to the affricate which we have suggested.   Now, it is
> usually assumed that the Ostrogoths in Italy --- keeping much of the
> Roman system of government after their own rise to power --- had
> borrowed the term mota (and the practice for which it stood) from
the
> Late Latin muta "tax."  But the word need not necessarily be a
> borrowing from the Latin, for there is reason to believe that its
> occurrence in Gothic was not limited to Italy.  Etymologists point
> out that the Old Slavic word myto "customs, duty" (the word is still
> used in Modern Russian) was most likely borrowed from a Germanic
> language, probably from one of the eastern dialects bordering on
> Slavic territory.  The fact that OHG mauta first occurs in the
> Bavarian-Austrian dialect may point toward contact with, not the
> Italian Goths, but another of the Gothic tribes, situated nearer the
> Balkan homeland, whose language showed no trace of the consonantal
> changes that had affected the Italian branch."
>
> Sincerely yours,
> Cory
>
> P.S.
> 	I think your English is very good.  I would imagine that the
> majority of the world's native English speakers don't speak Oxford
> English either, and I don't know if any native speaker of English
> speaks it perfectly, so I wouldn't give the matter another
> thought.
>
...


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