More Toponymics

[Guenther Ramm]

Fredrik <gadrauhts at hotmail.com> wrote:    > Some times I might be a little philosophic, but I'll try not to.
   
  - I didn’t mean that so much, you know :)
  
> But if a language is gone it is gone 
> and new ones doesnt appear in those places.
   
  - Well, sometimes it does. For instance, Latin is dead, but its “children” live on. PG is dead, but we have a handful of modern Germanic languages. If you mean the absence of direct descendants, then Gothic really seems to have died “childless” (unless we regard Gotlandic as its successor, in some way).
  
> Actually, the people in my life (family and friends) have always 
asked me why I even bother to learn a language that nobody else uses. 
> I won't have any use for it.
   
  
  - The same I used to hear when starting to learn Old Norse.
  
  
> If you use igkaland you use none gothic words anyway so why not use a 
> form of Peru, maybe Pairu. I recently read that the UN tries to make
some kinda standard about toponymics. So why not follwo it, at least 
> a little.

  - *Igkaland seems to me to be closer to the pattern of Gothic toponyms (and Old Germanic at large): ethnonym + toponymic ending (-land by default). The people are then *Igkans (though I don’t know to what extend the today’s Peruvians may be called Incas?) and the adjective *igkisks. The once-being Incan Empire could be then *Igkareiki. *Pairu is no bad, but we have to get it somehow conform with the Gothic morphology. Is it a neutral u-stem? Maybe, nevertheless, *Pairuland? (just a madman for this -land, you see :)
  
> A thought about the names of some places used by the vikings. These 
> are not used in the modern scandinavian languaues now.
> E.g. a swedish name for Irak should have been Särkland in that case 
> and maybe Algeria would have been Blåland. But it ain't so.
> So what ever wulfila and his pals called the 
> countries/states/provinces at their time, it wouldn't most likley bee 
> so today if gothic never became extinct.
   
  - Särkland I guess has something to do with Saracens? I’d think of adopted Greek Mesopotamia. *Maisupautamja? (just a “loud thought”). But unlike this, North Africa was no terra incognita for the historic Goths, with Vandals their cousins founding a state in what is now Tunisia and Algeria (I mean the coast line). Vandals and Ostrogoths had a lot of mutual contacts before the fall of Carthago Vandalica, and they spoke essentially the same language. There was definitely a certain name of the land which the Vandals occupied, but since we don’t know it (?), we’re in no better position than elsewhere.
  - Another way is to calque a country’s name from the native language. The more I look at “my” Stainagardi the more I like it (“over-modest” as usual:) I close my eyes and see a line like this: terra longinqua quam Gothi lingua sua Staenogardiam appellant (Ammianus Marcellinus) or: ...ubi et Stenegardza in fabulis eorum patere refertur (Jordanes). Time to call a psychoanalyst?
  
> So what ever wulfila and his pals called the
  > countries/states/provinces at their time, it wouldn't most likley bee
  > so today if gothic never became extinct.
   
  - But, if it never became extinct, it would never be so today like we’re trying to reconstruct it (i.e. following the grammar of the 4th century). My idea was that if we write a Gothic language with all its inflexions, cases etc, the country names shouldn’t look so quite alien, and besides, they need to find their place in the grammar, that is to get a gender, declension and the rest. If strongly needed, it could be doubled by a modern name, e.g. a headline “Niujista us Stainagardjai (Zimbabwai)”
  Ualarauans

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