[gothic-l] Gothic in spanish

[Dan Mencher]

It's funny how language connections just appear and then make sense, isn't it?
I love it when I'm introduced to a new way that two seemingly unrelated
languages have something significant in common, whether or not it's a
coincedence.

I don't know about 'guante/vante', although what you wrote makes sense. But
consider this interesting tidbit between Spanish, English, and Dutch, two other
Germanic languages:

In English, the word 'pretty' has its fair share of uses. Two of them are:

-an adjective similar in meaning to 'beautiful'
-an adverb similar in meaning to 'rather' or 'quite' ('That's a pretty big
house!').

Now, the interesting thing is that in Spanish, the word 'muy' means 'very',
while the Dutch word 'mooi' means 'beautiful'. The words 'muy' and 'mooi',
which are pronounced similarly, cover both of the mentioned uses of 'pretty'.
Although they are in two different languages, it should be noted that Spain
ruled Holland many years back, and it's not impossible that Dutch picked up
some Spanish during that time (it's not vice versa because Portuguese
has 'muito', which is a direct sister-word to 'muy' in Spanish, showing that
the word was in Iberia first). This would also show that at some time in the
past, at least one other language had a single word for both uses of 'pretty'
described above. Pretty neat, huh?!?!

By the way, forgive me for moving the conversation away from Gothic, but I
thought that all that stuff was really interesting, and a response to Fredrik's
letter seemed an appropriate place to put it.

-Dan

"It was the old notion that justice shouldn't arise from the laws, but the laws
from justice." -Joseph Joubert


Quoting Fredrik <gadrauhts at hotmail.com>:

> There's a word in spanish that is 'guante' which i think means
>
> something like 'glove'. Could this be a loan from gothic or do some
>
> one know it's origin?
>
> I haven't seen any word in gothic similar to guante with the same
>
> meaning but the word is to smililar to the swedish 'vante' to be a
>
> coincidence. 'Vante' is a type of thin glove.
>
> Isn't it common that germanic initial w becomes gu in roman languages?
>
> In that case guante would come from wante or something like that...
>
>
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