Gundemar (Was Visigothic identity of Spain)

[ualarauans]

Hi, Tom

Yes, really Suebian seems a better option, from the historical view. 
Thanks for pointing it out. Still, the name fits so nicely into the 
Burgundian royal onomasticon that I'd hesitate to drop the idea. A 
chance of a Burgundian name for a Visigothic king was probably an 
inter-dynastic marriage. Are there any accounts of such a connection?

Another problem is that when adopting a name from a related, but 
slightly different language people usually accommodated it to their 
specific pronunciation. So, for instance, Old Norse sources mention 
Aðalsteinn referring to Eþelstân, king of England. When the 
Visigoths, given that they still knew their language, happened to 
hear of a person calling himself Gundamâr, most natural for them was 
not to try to imitate a long [a:], an exceptionally rare sound in 
Gothic (examples like þâhta, brâhta and the like might contain a 
nasalized vowel) but to substitute the whole with their Gunþimêrs, 
being actually the same name, but in Gothic version. It's different 
if the name was written already after the Visigoths and other 
Germanic peoples in the Romance territory had lost their languages. 
In this case they probably were left with fixed Latinized variants 
reflecting the last stage of the spoken language before it died out. 
In short, a Visigoth still speaking Gothic could translate a 
Burgundian or Suebian name, but his Romanized descendant could not.

So, when had Gothic died in Spain?

Ualarauans

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, macmaster at ... wrote:
>
> Could that be a Suebian name? That would make more sense than a 
Burgundian
> in the region - and would be, I'd guess, even more likely than a 
Visigoth.
> 
> ualarauans wrote:
> > Well, strictly spoken, Gundemarus is not Gothic, but Burgundian.
> > Notice the voiced stop [d] and the long [a:] which features are
> > clearly North-West Germanic, shared by Burgundian (as a result 
of a
> > longer intercourse?) unlike other East Germanic languages. The 
royal
> > Burgundian dynasty favored names with the Gund- element: their 
kings
> > were called Gundacharius, Gundobadus, Gundeuechus et sim. Gothic
> > *Gunþimêrs ("battle/famous") would probably appear as 
Gunthemirus in
> > a Latinized source.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20061118/b5dc895c/attachment.htm>