Greeting Hails

[marja erwin]

Thank you!

That gets to another point - D.H. Green discusses how Wulfila almost
exclusively refers to weihs and avoids hailags, and upper German texts
use wih, while Anglo-Saxon and low/middle German texts almost
exclusively refer to heilag. He argues that Wulfila chose weihs because
hailags was associated with worldly luck and military victory.

That leaves me wondering how early Gothic Christians would have felt
about the greeting hails/haila/hailata. In these contexts, of course,
it's Roman soldiers mocking Jesus. Perhaps some early Gothic Christians
might have preferred fagino, and their pagan contemporaries might have
used either or both greetings? Just a thought.

On Sun, 2012-06-03 at 07:05 -0400, Grsartor at aol.com wrote:
>   
> A small discovery about the "hails" construction:
> 
> remember that it occurs twice, in Mark and in John:
> 
> 
> hails þiudan Iudaie - Mark 15:18 - Hail, [o] King of the Jews.
> hails þiudans Iudaie - John 19:3 - Hail [the] King of the Jews.
> 
> I wondered why John's version did not seem to have "king" as a
> vocative, 
> and thought it might be due to carelessness. In a sense there was 
> carelessness: my own. If I had bothered to check the Greek in John's
> version I should 
> have seen that it says
> 
> hail (chaire - an imperative) the king of the Jews.
> 
> But whereas John had the king word in the nominative (basileus) Mark
> had it 
> in the vocative (basileu) and with no definite article. It therefore
> looks 
> as if Wulfila was faithful to the material he translated, and the two 
> lines given above have been correctly transmitted to us.
> 
> Incidentally, I wondered about the correctness of the Greek here,
> since the 
> language the New Testament was written in is said to be often poor - 
> "impoverished and crippled" as a former Bishop of Birmingham put it,
> though I am 
> not myself advanced enough to notice its deficiencies. I checked
> Mark's 
> version in Vincent Taylor's Greek Text of Mark, and reproduce below
> part of 
> what appears there, without pretending that I fully understand it:
> 
> chaire, basileu corresponds to the Latin greeting Ave Caesar. The 
> vocative, which admits the royal right... is 'a note of the writer's
> imperfect 
> sensibility to the more delicate shades of Greek idiom', Moulton,
> i.71.
> 
> Gerry T.
> 
> In a message dated 01/06/2012 04:00:06 GMT Daylight Time, 
> r_scherp at yahoo.com writes:
> 
> Hails!
> 
> Well, the opinions vary. I think we also have to distinguish between 
> adjective and noun. In 'Verit heilir' the word clearly appears as an
> adjective. 
> In German, however, 'Heil' seems to be used primarily as a noun that
> calls 
> for the dative: 'Heil dir'. The examples Gerry posted seem to indicate
> a 
> similar usage, but with an accusative instead of dative. Is that a
> valid 
> interpretation?
> 
> Randulfs
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Thomas Ruhm <thomas at ...> wrote:
> >
> > In other languages greetings and other frequently used expressions
> with 
> not much meaning the singular can be generalized.
> >
> 
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