New file uploaded to gothic-l (Christmas and Yule)

[Arthur Jones]

Hails frijandeis meinai,
   
  Llama Nom has made a number of very salient points regarding the calendar. The only problem I see today with any of it is that legitimate doubts have recently arisen about the word "Naubaimbair" on a palimpsest calendar.
   
  Dr. David Landau, of the Tampere (Finland) University of Technology, Institute of Software Systems, has written "The Study of Old Texts with the Aid of Digital Technology: The Gothic Manuscripts" (a dissertation plus subsequent reports), in which he has solved many ambiguities arising from unclear, smudged, obscured, torn or missing, and other words and phrases in the Codex Argenteus, the Codex Ambrosianus, the Salzburg Calendar, Skeireins, and Ravenna Deed. 
   
  After applying state-of-the-art digital scanning and clarifying techniques, Dr. Landau has concluded that, where experts heretofore thought they saw the word "Naubaimbair" that had been scratched off and over-written by Latin characters, they were apparently mistaken. His wave-length printouts indeed reveal that the letters removed in the palimpsest process did not spell out "November" in Gothic at all.
   
  How much doubt does this development cast upon the Gothic calendar and its remnants from pre-Christian usage? I have no idea. However, I would suggest that we take full account of Dr. Landau's findings (completed, incidentally, in cooperation with Dr. Lars Munkhammar, University of Uppsala, who is both custodian of, and authority on, the Codex Argenteus, and who has been a key figure in the emerging "mini-Renaissance" of Gothic history and culture in Bulgaria in the past several years).
   
  You can find the digital scanning results here:
   
  http://www.modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~david.report.pdf
   
  The section on "Deciphering the Palimpsests" appears on pages 60-61.
   
  Thuk golja,
   
  Aizamunds
  

llama_nom <600cell at oe.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
          
Probably the native months, as elsewhere in Germania, didn't
originally match up perfectly with the Roman months. The two Yule
months would have originally marked, more or less, one month's length
of time before yule (the midwinter feast) and one month's length of
time after, as defined according to native tradition. The Icelandic
'ýlir', for example, begins on the second day of the week falling
within November 10-17. From the Calendar, it seems that the Goths, by
the time it was written, had altered this system to bring their native
month names into line with the Roman months, so that 'fruma jiuleis'
became a synonym for November. The choice of November or December may
have been a bit arbitrary when this process of co-ordinating calendars
was first undertaken. Since the original month would have overlapped
with part of December, it could just as easily have come to be the
name for that month, as did its Old English equivalent 'se æ´rra
jéola'. If they called the second yule month 'anþar jiuleis' and
co-ordinated it with December, at least it wouldn't sound as anomalous
as doing this would with the Old English 'se æftera jéola' which
instead was naturally seen as the nearest equivalent to January. But
I suppose, for all we know, the Goths might have inserted some other
name as the native synonym for December, or else used no native
synonym at all. Or maybe the tradition that the two yule-months were
consecutive was too strong.

LN

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell@> wrote:
> >
> > The month name 'fruma jiuleis' which appears in the Calendar as a
> > synonym for 'Naubaimbair' is masculine singular, as shown by the
> > adjective: a long ja-stem like hairdeis. It corresponds to ON ýlir
> > (masculine singular) and Anglian OE giuli (mentioned by Bede:
> > Primusque eorum mensis, quem Latini Januarium vocant, dicitur
> > Giuli...December Giuli, eodem quo Januarius nomine, vocatur... 
> Menses
> > Giuli a conversione solis in auctum diei, quia unus eorum præcedit,
> > alius subsequitur, nomina accipiunt (cited in the OED)) -- in later
> > West Saxon OE the months before and after the feast are called 'se
> > æ´rra géola' and 'se æftera géola', with a change of declension to
> > masculine n-stems.
> 
> It would be nice if we could call December fruma jiuleis and 
> January – anþar jiuleis. But why November in the Calender?
> 
> > The midwinter feast itself -- the 12 days of Christmas -- is neuter
> > plural in ON and Icelandic (jól), and sometimes in Old English (æ´r
> > géolum = advent). Maybe the tendency to make it singular came as 
> the
> > word's meaning changed to apply to the Christian festival. In 
> view of
> > which, maybe it is worth having a more specific word after all for 
> the
> > day itself when Christ's birth is commemorated, and keep the old
> > grammar for the festive 12 days as a whole.
> 
> I support the idea of having separate terms for the pagan and the 
> Christian festival. For the latter maybe smth like Xristujiul in 
> singular?
> 
> Ualarauans
>



         


ARTHUR A. JONES


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