More Toponymics

Tue May 23 16:29:24 UTC 2006

No language is dead that is still understood and used, no matter how few
people use it. Latin is very much alive...there are websites (and books and
journals) which publish new poetry and prose in Latin, and there are people
who speak it...I once read some Latin prose to a scholar, who chided me for
my "slovenly" pronunciation...and Gothic itself is coming back to life, in
the form of the neo-Gothic which many members here are working on...and
Church Slavonic is anything but dead...

Regards,

Alex Martin

On 5/23/06, Fredrik <gadrauhts at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> >   - Well, sometimes it does. For instance, Latin is dead, but
> its "children" live on.
>
> Well...yes, but it depends on how to define it.
> You can say that latin neverbecame extinct but as all languages it
> changed during time and became "modern latin" but in several forms.
> If we should say that latin is dead, we mean latin spoken 2000 years
> ago but than we must say that english spoken 500 years ago and 400
> years and 50 years ago are dead as well.
> As I tried to say before, old english never died but changed into
> modern, eventhough in one way it could be called dead coz it aint
> spoken.
>
> 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).
>
> The same about this as about latin.
>
> When does a language become dead and when does it have a "child"???
> Gothic as we use it might have had a child known as crimean gothic.
> And according to my definition of dead languages crimean gothic is
> dead, and with that also gothic.
>
>
> >
> >   - *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.
>
> Igkareiki is good in that meaning. And igkans and igkisks are also
> good, but I would perhaps use these words for the people of Igkareiki
> and not Peru.
>
>
> > *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 :)
>
> It could be a problem to fit in toponymics in gothic grammar. But
> Pairu could be, as you say, neuter u-stem. Or perhaps end it in -
> land, which would make it more easy to use.
>
> I don't know exactly what an adjective would be, maybe
> pairuisks/pairulandisks, and not what we could call a person of Peru.
>
> The language of the incas would maybe be igkarazda and the modern
> language based on a word for quechua.
>
>
> >   - Särkland I guess has something to do with Saracens?
>
> It might be so or/and from old swedish saerker = shirt.
> The people there were wearing cloths which the vikings might have
> called saerker.
>
>
> >   - 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. >
>
> I cannot do anything but agree.
>
> Before you wrote about Macedonia and said that there's an attested
> name Makidonja. I guess that F.Y.R.O.M isn't used in colloquial
> speech but mostly only Macedonia. And a gothic name could be a
> translation of F.Y.R.O.M but we can use just Makidonja colloquial.
>
> About France, you said "Why *Fragkareiki and not *Fragkja or even
> *Frantsja (< France)."
> If we use the romance name Francia as base gothic would have Fragkja.
> Latin uncia is ugkja in gothic.
> But coz gothic is a germanic language I think it would be better to
> use a name which is more similar to the other germanic lanuages.
> German: Frankreich, Dutch: Frankrijk, Swedish: Frankrike.
> So Fragkareiki would be the best choice I think.
>
>
> Some ideas of F.Y.R.O.M:
>
> Former: faurthis
> Yugoslav: sunthrawinithisks/jugauslabisks/sunthraslabisks
> Republic: thiudawaihts
> Macedonia: Makidonja
>
>
> /Fredrik
>
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