Translating Getica (cerva) (was Re: Attila's speech)

[ualarauans]

Translating Jordanes "back into Gothic" I stumbled over the word 
Lat. cerua "she-deer", "doe" (Getica 123-4). It's the fragment where 
the legend is told of a doe leading Hunnish hunters the way over the 
Maeotic swamp. I could find several options of reconstructing the 
word for this animal based on evidence of the sister languages. 
These are:

*algs M.-i "elk" (ON elgr, OE eolh (?), but OHG el(a)ho M.-an). 
However, "elk" is not "deer", strictly spoken. The feminine form 
could probably be *algini F.-jo or maybe just algs F.-i.

*haíruts M.-a "deer" (ON hjörtr, OE heor(o)t, OHG hiruz). Seems OK 
semantically, but I am at a total loss with probable feminine. 
*hairuti F.-jo?

*hráins M.-a "reindeer" (ON hreinn, OE hrân). Same is here. Or maybe 
one could use *hrainadius N.-a covering both sexes.

Now as I was in any case compelled to resort to a reconstruction,
I thought of another possibility. I speculated that the word (and 
maybe the plot of the story as well) could have been taken by the 
Goths from a non-Germanic language spoken in the area where the 
described event took place. Newcomers are usually apt to borrow 
words for local fauna from natives of the landscape, after all. 
Being not a biologist I can't judge whether the deer of the South 
Russian steppes did to any significant extent differ from the deer 
met in places of the Gothic Urheimat (wherever this have been 
situated). If it really did, then that's an argument for the 
loanword suggestion.

In my opinion, the donor-language in question could have been 
Sarmatian or Alanic, i. e. Northeastern Iranian. The word is
OIr. *sâka-, still living in Ossetic sag "hart". One of the major 
Scythian tribes, namely the Sacae, bore this name as their ethnonym 
(so Abaev 1949, rejected by Szemerenyi 1980). The voicing of 
intervocalic k > g occured in Alanic ca. 2nd – 3rd centuries CE 
(Abaev o. c.), while the final vowels were still kept intact. This 
corresponds to the time of the presence of the Goths in the Black 
Sea region. The resulting Gothic form could have been *saga M.-an 
with the meaning "(Scythian steppe) deer". Hence the feminine 
counterpart is *sago F.-on (in Ossetic, they say syl-sag, 
lit. "female deer").

Possible objection: the first /a/ in presumed Alanic *saga (> Oss. 
sag) must have been a long â. The question is whether the phonetic 
system of Gothic did already have the long â too, and, if not, what 
sound it could have substituted for it. Proto-Germanic did in fact 
turn all â's into ô's, and it involved loanwords too. Examples are 
PCelt. Dânuvios > Go. Dônawi, Lat. Rômânus > Go. Rumôns. But later, 
Gothic developed an â of its own, in words like brâhta, þâhta etc 
where the -âh- is from earlier -anh-. It seems to have been spoken 
without nasalization in the "historical time" (Braune-Helm 1952). 
Later loans from Greek and Latin display Gothic /a/ standing for the 
long vowel: fâskja, pâska (Streitberg 1920). The exact dating of the 
loss of the nasalization however is not known. Also, some dialects 
of Gothic might have been keeping the nasalized pronunciation longer 
than others. In which case the old conventional ô could still have 
been used to render foreign â.

Ualarauans

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