Northwest Germanic

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans at ...> wrote:
>
> Get. 22 Fervir = Go. *fairhveis pl.

Interesting example. So perhaps this is another instance of a
folk-name being taken up in verse as a 'heiti' for people in general;
or maybe it's just the coincidence of one particular group calling
themselves "the people". Old Saxon 'firhios' suggests a ja-stem, and
that's why I reconstructed it as *fairhvjos in Drus, although a lot of
ethnic names were i-stems originally, so I don't know...  Was there a
tendency to turn i-stems into ja-stems or a-stems in Old Saxon? Old
i-stems are often partly or wholly assimilated to the a-stems in Old
English (cf. fíras).

And could it be that this name has a North Germanic source?

"The Scandinavian ethnography in Jordanes is based primarily on
Ptolemy's SKANDIA chapter. [...] However it also includes what appears
to be a new autochthanous source. According to Get. 3, a Scandinavian
king Rudvulf [Roduulf] sought refuge with Theoderich, and we can
assume that his reports of tribes surpassing the Germanic peoples in
bodily size and spirit (gentes Germanis corpore et animo grandiores)
have come into the Getica. Names such as Fervir [...] have received a
variety of conflicting interpretations" (Ludwig Rübekeil 2002:
'Scandinavia in the light of ancient tradition', pp. 594-604 in The
Nordic Languages. Eds. Widmark, Bandle, et al. Berlin: de Gruyter. p.
603).

> There's Slavic evidence for Go. *ga-nazjan.

Thanks for reminding me of that! It just goes to show, Biblical
Gothic, as attested, is just one variety of what must once have been a
complex continuum of East Germanic dialects. As the Crimean Gothic
evidence suggests, it could be that even some features that are
considered as diagnostic for "East Germanic" weren't at all universal
among people who considered themselves Gothic speakers in the
Migration Era.

LN


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