Germanic Toponymy in Portugal and Galicia

[o_cossue]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ingemarn2000" <ingemar at ...> wrote:
>
> Dear Cossue!
>
> Warmly welcome and thank you for an invaluable treasury of Germanic
related words.
>
> I agree that the Suevic influence i Portugal seems to have remained
stable even after the Gothic conquering but this does not outrule the
possibility that many of the personal  names you mention could have been
Gothic as well. I have myself, when I was preparingt my dissertation 
about the Goths, made some research of Gothic artefacts in both Asturias
and Galizia and specially so in Léon, Astorga, Braga, Coimbra, Merida
and Toledo. I mostly looked on Visigothic Stone Art and stelae and also
Vadensiensic stelae. There indeed must be also Gothic influence there.
Concerning the language in Portugal I noticed when listening to the
conversation  of a group a bit from distant the sound was similar to
e.g. Dutch - it means there is a kind of germanic sound melody over the
language that is not extant in Spanish. The Suevic inheritance could be
an explanation.
>
> Best greetings
> Ingemar
>
>


Thank you very much for your welcome, Ingemar. Truly warm :-)

I certainly agree with you: most of the names we know for the Suevi are
common also among Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals or Burgundians! So, on
a one per one basis, its difficult or even impossible to assign a word,
or a personal or place name to Goths or Sueves (Ermericus, Reckila,
Reckiar, Reccemundus, Remismundus.... are Suevi names which are known
also among other East Germans) though there are also Suevic and medieval
Galician names like Ansemarus, Baldemarus, Pippinus, Pantardus,
Gainnardus, Arnulfus... that don't look Gothic, but which are also
present as genitives in the countryside, naming villages, hamlets and
parishes). So, it's the geographic distribution of toponyms, names,
words, etcetera, what can tell apart Gothic and Suevic, al least in a 
probabilistic point of view. So, for example, the are many Germanic
names in the medieval Catalan    charters that are unknown in Galicia
(now, these names could be also Frankish), but the contrary is also
true, and there are a large number of Germanic Galician names that are
unknown in Catalonia. Again, Galician language have some tens of
exclusive germanism, but the country probably didn't  received a notable
number of Visigoths prior to the muslim invasion, at a time when
Visigoths had long lost their language, so this words should be
considered Suevi better than Gothic, thought it could be impossible to
prove that laverca, maga, lobio, gastallar, brétima... are not
Visigothic words.

Anyway, Gothic influence in Galicia and Portugal cannot be denied, as
these lands were part of the Visigothic kingdom for more than a century,
and their laws where The Law for over half a millennium! As an example,
the privative civil laws on inheritance, in Galicia, are still directly
derived from Gothic laws, as they where 1500 years ago, thought some
figures, like the collective property of woods by the neighbours of
adjacent hamlets, are usually considered Suevi.

Cheers.

Cossue.

Sorry for the estrange symbols in the last message. HTML, hates me...



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