Greeting Hails

[Grsartor at AOL.COM]

About whether some early Gothic Christians would have preferred "fagino"  
(rejoice) to "hails": now that the matter has been mentioned, it does seem  
plausible; for it translates the Greek chaire literally, and Wulfila is often 
 very literal in his renditions of the NT Greek. As for the use of "hail" 
to  refer to worldly luck and military success, such a noun use occurs in 
both  German and Old Norse. I give below some further facts excavated from  
dictionaries:
 
Cleasby and Vigfusson's Icelandic-English Dictionary, which is primarily  
about the old tongue, includes versions of both the Germanic "holy" words 
that  have been mooted: they appear as "vígja" i.e. vigja with an acute accent 
on the  first vowel, in case it gets corrupted in transmission, which is 
said to mean  "consecrate" both in a Christian and in a non-Christian sense; 
and "heilagr"  (the consonant at the end is inflexive) which means "holy", 
again in either a  Christian or a non-Christian sense. The word is said to be 
derived from "heill"  (whole) and to be consequently not so old as the 
primitive vé, veihs.
 
"Heilagr" is also said to have been used as a lawterm to mean inviolable,  
one whose person is sacred, with the comment that this is undoubtedly the 
word's  original sense.
 
The Oxford English Dictionary under "holy" has the interesting remark that  
the word's sense "is expressed in the Gothic of Ulfilas by weihs (but 
hailag,  apparently 'consecrated', 'dedicated' is read on a runic inscription 
generally  held to be Gothic)".
 
Less helpfully, the OED adds that "we cannot in Old English get behind  
Christian senses in which "holy" is equated with Latin sanctus, sacer".
 
Gerry T.
 
 
In a message dated 03/06/2012 23:59:45 GMT Daylight Time,  
marja-e at riseup.net writes:

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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