[gothic-l] Gauter,Gutar,Jutar,Goter

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Hi Ingemar, and thank you for your letter!

But from your remark below, it appears that you did not
understand what I was saying. I have experienced such before
when an opponent manages to generate so much noise that
a simple message does not manage to get through.
You admit it yourself too, that there was "chaos" in your
computer, with multiple message.

Yet, I tried to be very clear the whole time.
The problem may have been that people were
not reading what I was saying, but rather reading
what Bertil said, whose words did not reflect
mine at all, because he never understood my simple
message.


>Hi Keth,Anders et al.
>
>I have followed the intense discussion as good as possible. There is too
>much resending of earlier texts and maybe also a number of exactly
>similar messages  making it a total chaos in my computer. Please snip
>much more that I can keep  different messages apart from each other.

Actually Bertil snipped so mmuch of my messages that
you pprobably didn't see that opinions he appeared
to be arguing against were not what I had actually said.


>As you seem to read Swedish, dear Keth, I can provide you with my  book
>and in that way save a lot of arguing both for me, Bertil and other -
>and also for you.

Yes, I should probably read your book.


> Anders on the other hand may easily read the Swedish material of
>Thorsten Andersson for example. I must support Bertils wiew of Th.
>Anderssons articles. He definitely links these different peoples with
>each other and I strongly recommend to get his material.

I never denied that Anderson may tie things very well together.
In fact if you read my posts you will see that I never argued against
Anderson, whom I have not read. But I believe the de Vries' version
is saying the same thing, though perhaps more briefly.
I did not argue against de Vries either. In fact he uses
the exact same argument you presented a while ago,
an argument that according to de Vries goes back to an
article by R.Much in 1897. I posted it with a very clear
header. No comments of my own. A pure quote.
According to Much there may once have existed a Greek
manuscript with genealogies and then the names got distorted
because the Greeks pronounced the letters differently from the Goths.
Someone from England (Steve or Brian?) gave the correct argument.
It was the same as yours, except that it wasn't Wulfila's alphabet
that was involved, but the Greek alphabet.

In other words, I do not really believe that either Reichert
or Anderson have any new arguments. And such arguments
are also possible to formulate quite briefly.
Hence there should be no need to read large tomes
for a simple thing like that.

The thing with Bertil was that he went into denial,
denying elementary facts of the type 2+2 = 4.
That upset me, but I guess that is his style.



>Regarding Andreas Nordin, whose manuscript (before he published) I have
>used as the Swedish example of Jordanes parallel with Gierow in English
>and Svennung in German matched towards the Latin original, he is a
>linguist and not an historian. Because of that he has of course just
>translated the Latin original without changing the names.Still the most

Indeed, I consider it a crime to change names, and
Nordin therefore did the only right thing.
That is why I use the critical edition.
Before I got it, it was really difficult with all the translations
saying different things. It got to the point where it was absolutely
necessary that I know the original text in Latin.
Although I am not very good in Latin, it helps a great deal
to read in parallell with a good translation.
I think it odd that people even dare discuss like that
without having access to the original text.
That is after all ALL we have.
The rest is all interpretation.


>commonly accepted meaning og Gapt is Gaut and one should have very
>strong arguments to prove it wrong.

That is where you misunderstood me.
Probably because Bertil presented lots of arguments
against an opinion that I never had. But when you
only read Bertil's argument, you probably attributed certain
opinions to me that I don't have, nor did express.
Thus it may have appeared to you as if I was arguing against
Reichert, or against de Vries (or for, what do I know)
But I was neither for nor against any of them.
Reichert I haven't read. Anderson I haven't read.
De Vries I have read. But the way I read him, he does not
present one single opinion, but a variety of opinions.
And I don't need to have a single opinion.
I can live perfectly well with a number of possibilities.
For me it is the logic that matters. Not the opinions.

And so I wasn't trying to prove anything.
I just tried to separate between the actual text (what it says)
and the various interpretations thereof, as a matter of principle.
So that we can all agree what the Ms. is saying, and
when we all agree what the manuscripts are saying,
THEN we can proceed to discuss the various interpretations, how
likely they are, and how we can assign more certainty to some
and less to others.

I do not know if you have ever taken a course in probability theory?
Or statistics. Do you know what sample spaces, expectation values
and statistical variance is ? I am always assuming that people
know such things, because we do after all live in the 21st century.
Such things are extremely relevant to such things as we are discussing.
Really good scholars have always had a built in sense for such things.
But now we expect a larger group of humanity to be able to think
abstractly, because we expect that mass education ought to give
us something in return.

The wisdom is that a theorem like that is not either right or wrong.
Thus it is impossible to prove it wrong.
And by the same token it is equally impossible to prove it right.
The only thing we can actually do is to estimate how likely
the various possibilities are. But the outcome of the estimates
also depends on the person who estimates. Hence we have
a very good old and timeproven word "opinion".

I was not arguing that the theorem was wrong.
I was only looking at how solid the argumentation appeared to
me. And when Dirk mentioned Raus and Rapt, I suddenly realized
that the arguments were actually weak. Not wrong, just weak.


>Of course the meaning 'outpourer'
>could be discussed but that is also a commonly accepted interpretation.

Yes, I saw a different explanation in Looijinga's book.
She mentions the verb "geya" (to bark I think it was)


>As an alternative I propose in the book, it may be simply 'the God'. If
>you write Gaut as Gauþ and then translates it as Gauð and regard the
>German Godess Gauðen you could see it as the God and the Goddess with no
>personal names. It makes as much sense for a progenitor god and does not
>alter the common cultic ancestry.
>
>I am leaving home for a week now so till then happy returns!


I have also been discussing language with some Icelanders.
And they always point out to us "mainlanders" that we do not
separate between "t" and "þ". But to them those are
ENTIRELY different sounds. Thus, to say that Got is the
same as Goþ is to them totally out of the question.
We Scandinavian mainlanders living with a much flattened language,
and we simply don't hear such differences any more. But in Old Norse
they were not conceived as the same. And not in runic Norse either.
Otherwise they would never have had two different runes for these two sounds:

    |            /|\
    |\     is     |
    |/     not    |
    |             |

  Thurs  is not  Tyr!


Best regards
Keth



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