[gothic-l] Re: Christensen's book on the Goths

[Francisc Czobor]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Ravi Chaudhary"
<ravichaudhary2000 at y...> wrote:
> ...
>  Balths -. Could also be `Bal' with the suffix `th"
>
>  Bal is a very famous and large clan; spread all over the North,
> including what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan.
>
>  Variants of it are Bal, Baliyan.
>
> See for example;
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JatHistory/message/141
>
>
> Dirk, I am running into all this material, and I cannot simply
> dismiss it out of hand.
>
> Ravi

Sorry to write this, but this assertion is not very plausible.
Maybe Jordanes did not know much about the early history of the
Goths, but after all he was a Goth and still knew the Gothic
language. In Getica (XXIX) he writes:
"ordinato super se rege Halarico, cui erat post Amalos secunda
nobilitas Balthorumque ex genere origo mirifica, qui dudum ob audacia
virtutis Baltha, id est audax"
In the English translation of Charles C. Mierow, this passage sounds
like this:
"they appointed Alaric king over them. He was of a famous stock, and
his nobility was second only to that of the Amali, for he came from
the family of the Balthi, who because of their daring valor had long
ago received among their race the name Baltha, that is, The Bold."

Thus, Balth(a) is originally an adjective that means "bold" and is
cognate with the English word "bold" (Old English: beald; German:
bald, from I.E. base *bhel-, according to Webster's New World College
Dictionary).
And what has to do a Gothic, i.e. Germanic clan, with the "Bal" of
Afghanistan and Pakistan? The Goths were never there.

Francisc


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