Northwest Germanic

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell@> wrote:
> >
> > > Get. 22 Fervir = Go. *fairhveis pl.
> > 
> > [...]
> > And could it be that this name has a North Germanic source?
> 
> I guess so. I remember reading somewhere that Fervir = Fjäre in 
> Halland. Now, what is Fjäre? :)

Any relation of Fjære in Aust-Agder, Norway? It would be good if we
could track down some Old Norse attestations of these names.
 
> It is interesting that, if the name is indeed i-stem plural, it 
> represents an evidence for rhotacism in NG as early as the 6th ct. or 
> even earlier (depends on where Jordanes got it from) and the sound 
> written by the Proto-Norse with the algiz rune [R] was already heard 
> close enough to [r]. Besides, I wonder why the name wasn't 
> automatically converted into Gothic as we would expect? Was *ferhwîR 
> not transparent for the Goths? Didn't Jordanes know Gothic as is 
> usually supposed? And why Suehans in Get. 21, then?

We should probably be cautious of reading too much into just one
letter! It could have been garbled in transmission by scribes with no
knowledge of North Germanic or Gothic. If they could turn
*Sun(jah)ildi into 'Sunielh' and 'Sunihil' (both attested in
manuscripts of the Getica), there's every chance they could have
garbled a name from further afield. But if it does go back to the
actual testimony of a North Germanic speaker, that would be exciting!
I wonder if there are any other sources of NG names of this era
recorded in Latin, and how they treat the reflex of Proto-Germanic /z/.

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