Some questions for you who might know

Mon May 15 20:49:13 UTC 2006

Hails, Frithureik!
  Nice to get your reply

Fredrik <gadrauhts at hotmail.com> wrote:  
--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Guenther Ramm <ualarauans at ...> wrote:

>   About "period". I don't know whether Koebler had sufficient

reasons to postulate *era and *stunda as possible existent Gothic

words. The first could easily be a misspelling (and a typical one for

Middle Latin) in the Latin-written Lex and Chronica Regum

Visigothorum (I must confess I did not see these primary sources) of

the ordinary Latin aera and so have nothing to do with Gothic. If

borrowed maybe it would rather look like *aira (cf. kaisar < Caesar,

but at the same time there is Kreks < Graecus)? Btw, is there any

rule of reflecting Latin –ae- / Greek –ai- in Gothic depending on

chronology and the way (oral or scribal) of borrowing? I wonder if it

could be connected with that discussion on the phonetic value of

Gothic digraphs we had here lately.

I don't know when ae became e in latin and why gothic as ai in kaisar

but e in kreks is not anything i know. I hope somebody here has info

enough to clear this out.

But most likely all three are loan from latin, and era and kreks

would be later loans.

Might it be like caesar was a loan in pgmc time?

  - I agree about kaisar, and L. N. has promised us his opinion on this topic, detailed and elegant as usual (excuse my reminder :). In the meanwhile I’d suppose Kreks could have been borrowed not directly from Latin, but maybe through some medium of Thracian, Sarmatian or whatever origin whose phonetic peculiarities and processes are known as much as not at all. Besides, Braune/Helm (Gotische Grammatik 1952: 8) adduce Kreks along with a few other words as an example of the so-called e2 (“das zweite e (= ahd. ea, ia)”). Indeed, OHG has Griahhi, but are Kreks and Griahhi not two different traditions (independent borrowings – cf. the Anlaut consonant and the stem vowel)? And were there any real phonologic difference between e1 and e2 in Gothic? Then why not two different letters?..

Even some germanic words in spanish ain't of gothic

origin but loan from old french and ultimately from frankish.

And some could also be loans to latin and then later it occurs in

spanish and provenзal.

  - Yes, but even if we accept *era and *stunda were Gothic, what are they better to be specialized for “period” than any of the really attested words meaning “time” or “some time”?

And the Holocaust, maybe So Qisteins.

(Or gataurths as a translation of german zerstцrung which is a

translation of hebrew shoah)

  - I also was in doubt about alabrunsts which is though close to what the word Holocaust originally meant (Streitberg’s dictionary says it translated Greek HOLOKAUTWMA in Mk. 12:33), still doesn’t fully reflect, without additional comments, what we mean now with the Holocaust. I have been thinking about it some time and now I would offer a compound *alamaurthr N. –a, where ala- is an emphasizing prefix (like in ON) and not literally “all”. You know regicide is a murder of a king, but genocide is most often only an attempt, bloody and horrible, to murder a nation. To say in Gothic *kunja-maurthr (< Late Lat. genocidium) would literally mean, I suppose, not more than an extermination of a particular clan (like what Ermanaricus tried to do to Rosomonians) that demands a vendetta (he got it finally). *Ala-maurthr (Iudaie) would accent that systematic and “unexceptionally devouring” side of the terror machinery aimed at total extermination. To have alabrunsts for “whole burnt
 offering” and *alamaurthr for the “Holocaust” would correspond with Modern Hebrew ‘ola “sacrifice” resp. sho’a “the Catastrophe of the European Jewry”.

According to runeberg IE albhi- is a feminine form of albho- = lat.

albus. the pgmc masc. form would be albaz and the gothic albs (but a-

stem), right?

  - If you mean the name for “Elves”, I’d also use *Albos M. –a Pl. like ON, although OE seems to have had masculine forms with –i-stems. We must be careful here since we don’t know what Gothic Albos really were – at minimum were they considered good (as Anglo-Saxon, hence all English tradition up to Tolkien) or some evil (as German Alptraum seems to hint)? Another German toponym with this stem I found is Elbing (lit. “small river”?) which is now Elblag (nasal a) in Poland (ex-Ostpreussen). The question is if this is originally Germanic (and thus = Gothic *Albiggs) or a later Germanization.

дlven is definite form of дlv, one of some words in swedish for river.

(some others are flod and е, where е is cognate to gothic ahva.)

The islands of Еland is in finnish Ahvenanmaa, the first part a loan

from germanic language.

A gothic name could be Ahvaland. (sounds little weird I think)

  - I didn’t know aelv is still a quite living common word in Swedish! That’s good for proposing *albs F. –i for some sort of rivers. Thus the Elbe becomes “a river par excellence” :)
  - *Ahvaland seems to be no more weird than Zealand (*Saiwaland) or our *Muldawi (all being a mixture of water and land).

>   Jordanes has uiscla alongside with Vistula and it is supposed to

be corrupted Gothic. Is it *Weisla, or *Weihsla (to the stem weih-

  "holy" or weihs "village")?

Is it a name of gothic (or germanic) origin or maybe from some other

language?

The t seems to be a part of the name in some sources.

Ptolemy also records the tribes around the Vistula River, which he

regards as the border between Germany and Sarmatia. He uses the Greek

spelling, "Ouistoula". Other ancient sources spell it "Istula".

Pomponius Mela refers to the "Visula" (Book 3) and Ammianus

Marcellinus to the "Bisula" (Book 22), both of which names lack the -

t-. The Anglo-Saxon poem Widsith refers to it as the "Wistla".

  - The Polish name is Wisla, but what is said about its etymology I don’t know unfortunately. I just suppose this –t(u)- or –c- of Jordanes were different ways to avoid through epenthesis the unpronounceable –sl- (cf. Sclauus for Slav). At least it could have been originally Germanic (smth like proposed Gothic *Weihsla, whence NHG Weichsel) which was later borrowed by the West Slavs.

>   The river flowing through Prague (Czech Republic) had a German

name Moldau (Chech Vltava). Could it be *Muldawi (the same word which

you proposed for Moldova, this latter was also called Moldau in

German). Or maybe *Wulthawi "a glorious river" (see Vltava)?

Maybe the original name was wulthawi which became vltava in czech

language. And in germanic later changed to muldawi. Or the other way?

  - Again, it’s pretty probable. You know a lot of Central/East European toponymics went this way: Germanic > Slavic > Germanic, e.g. Gothic *Gutisk Andi (or *Gutisk-andeis) > Pol. Gdansk > German Danzig. At any rate I see -awi a nice way to Gothicize Slavic place-names on –ava, -ova and the like.

The word awi is cognate to ahva which means flowing water/river. But

can awi be used in the same meaning?

Isn't it also used as steppe/meadow?

As I might have said before, the scythian steppe which included the

area of Moldova was oium (aujom) in gothic, from awi.

So was awi used for steppe?

Then Muldawi would be a good name for Moldova.

I don't know if i've said it but in swedish M. is Moldavien.

  - PG. *ahwo (Goth. ahva) and PG. *agwjo (Goth. *awi) differ only in suffix and pre-PG stress hence alternation of voiceless/voiced consonant according to Verner’s Law. Of cause awi was not a river but most probably something like “meadow”. There have been some hot discussions in literature about what and where Oium really were. I can’t now recollect all the arguments I was persuaded with, but I hold as most probable that it was a relatively small territory on the Eastern bank of the Lower Dnepr (just north of the Crimea). There must have been meadows, streams and marshes – shortly that what Goths could call *Aujos in a broader sense. What about “steppe” – could it better be haithi or thaurp? I was lately in Mongolia and had a chance to see steppes – there’s a real *watnawan there as you would call it. But what are they in the Ukraine?

  Best Regards
  Ualarauans

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com 

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> 
Get to your groups with one click. Know instantly when new email arrives
http://us.click.yahoo.com/.7bhrC/MGxNAA/yQLSAA/wWMplB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~-> 

You are a member of the Gothic-L list.  To unsubscribe, send a blank email to <gothic-l-unsubscribe at egroups.com>. 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gothic-l/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    gothic-l-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/