[gothic-l] Re: Old Gutnish

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Hi Francisc,
You wrote:
>
>--- In gothic-l at y..., keth at o... wrote:
>> ...
>> Yes vowel systems are some of the things that can change quite fast.
>> I think I discovered this morning another rule that makes it easy to 
>translate
>> back and forth between Old English and Old Norse. The rule is that 
>ON "ei"
>> becomes long "a" in English. Examples that I thought of are 
>Hygelac/Hugleik,
>> Wihstan/Vestein, but also gar/geir  ( a spear). Thus that 
>particularly interesting
>> sort of Danes mentioned in Beowulf, the Gardenas, would in Old Norse 
>correspond
>> to the "Geir-danir"  (=the Spear-Danes; who were they?).
>
>It is not quite correct to say that "ON "ei" becomes long "a" in 
>English".
No, you are of course right, that one then too easily thinks about
a English having descended from Old Norse or vice versa, which is
of course false. But I think the Vikings were probably aware of
such "rules of correspondence" and immediately understood that when
someone in England was called "Adelstan" then in Old Norse that would
be "Adelstein". And when they referred to Adelstan among themselves
they always said "Adelstein". A modern example of the same is that
in Norway we say "iskrem" for "ice-cream" which was an American
invention. But today I think the tendency has changed and that
young people prefer to adopt foreign words unchanged. Thus they
say "skeit-bård", "le-vais" and "naik", but write "skateboard" ,
"levis" and "nike".

So I meant "becoming" not in a historic sense, but as describing
what a word "becomes" when certain rules of transcription are applied to it.
So it is a function really, or a "mapping". The vowel system of one
language can sometimes be "mapped" onto the vowel sytem of another
language. But this only happens when the languages have a close
relationship and descend from a common root. I therefore felt that such
sytematic features should not be counted as real differences when
comparing two languages for the purpose of seeing that they are in
agreement as a result of both having developed from a common predecessor.
For example within Norway we have many regional languages. One
of the main differences is often that certain vowels are pronounced
slightly differently in different regions. This does not mean they
are "different" languages. You see something of the same when you
compare Austrian German with German German, where the Austrian
says "mein Gott", but the German says "main Gott" (in speech)
which is also one of the examples you mentioned.


>In fact we have here two different evolutions of the same 
>Proto-Germanic [ai]-diphthong, that became "á" (long a) in Old 
>English, and "ei" in Old Norse. This correspondence can be found also 
>in the most basic words inherited from Common Germanic, for instance:
>Gmc. *aina-z > Goth. ains, ON einn, OE án (> Eng. one)
>Gmc. *gaita-z > Goth. gaits, ON geitr, OE gát (Eng. goat)
>Gmc. *xaima-z > Goth. haims. ON heimr, OE hám (Eng. home)
>etc. etc. etc.
>
>> ... 
>> Another example is how the Old Dutch long "i" (written "ij") became 
>the diphtong "ei".
>> Thus when you see a Dutch word such as Rijn, mijn, fijn, zijn, you 
>can be pretty sure 
>> it used to be a long "i" some centuries ago, but today it is 
>invariably pronounced as the
>> diphtong. 
>
>Inndeed, the Dutch "ij" (now pronounced something like [ei]) 
>originates from the Common Germanic long [i]. A similar 
>dipthongization occured also in Modern English (were the Gmc. long 
>[i], still written "i", is pronounced [ai]) and High German (where 
>Gmc. long i, written and pronounced "ei" in MHG, is written "ei" and 
>pronounced [ai] in Modern German).

Yes, this was the example, which you can still hear in Austria.

Best regards
Keth



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