Epithets used for Theodosius, for Constantinople, etc.

[Edmund Fairfax]

The name 'Saba' is generally considered Germanic: see, for example, Förstemann's Altdeutsches Namenbuch (1900: vol. 1, cols. 1285-1286), cf. the first element in the Old High German personal name Sabarich/Savarich, which is cognate. The Saba you mention was not a foreigner but in fact a Christian Goth: "the story of blessed Saba, who is a witness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ. For this man, a Goth by race and living in Gothica, shone out like a light in the firmament, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, imitating the saints and eminent in their company in upright actions according to Christ" (The Passion of St Saba the Goth1.1-2). His refusal to eat heathen sacrificial flesh was not because he was a foreigner but because he was a Christian.

'Lagarimanus' is extremely difficult to etymologize as a Germanic name; more likely it is a Latinized Alanic name, like Saphrax.

The name 'Farnobius' has been convincingly explained as Germanic. See Norbert Wagner. 1996. Beiträge zur Namenforschung. (vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 161-164).

The etymology of personal names is not a reliable guide to ethnicity. It would be wrong, for example, to assume that every woman named Zoe or Agatha must be Greek merely because their names are of Greek origin.

I might add here, perhaps needlessly, that the question of ethnicity in Gothic studies is hugely controversial. Yet neither the primary written sources nor the archaeological finds allow one to make any substantiated claims about the ethnic composition of the 'Goths', although this has not stopped even respectable historians from airing suppositions. Poly-ethnic confederations for the purposes of making war have been known in all historical periods, but this is not evidence of an ethnically-mixed society. Examples such as the old South African institution of apartheid show that even when groups of different racial types inhabit a given area, the societyneed not be seen as a "mixed" one. It should also be borne in mind that history-writing often reflects the politically correct concerns of the day: early twentieth-cenutry historians such as Kossina stressed ethnic "purity". In reaction to the racial policies of the Nazi era, the pendulum has swung in the
 opposite direction, especially among German historians, who are keen to distance themselves from the past and focus on the multi-cultural and international. It is also good to remember that the two words 'history' and 'story' both descend ultimately from the same word, to wit, Latin 'historia'.





On Thursday, December 5, 2013 12:52:50 PM, marja erwin <marja-e at riseup.net> wrote:
 
  
On Thu, 2013-12-05 at 06:20 -0800, OSCAR HERRE wrote:
> 
> dude goth was their lingo.......and the goth weren't big in
> assimilating other races......they were like the mafia you
> know......our own thing....together we live and together we
> die........
> 

I don't think we're working with the same facts here.

First off, there's the practical question of how the Goths could emerge
in Scythia without to some extent taking in other peoples. Second, there
are people who are known to be Goths who either weren't of entirely
Gothic descent, such as Wulfila, or have non-Gothic names, such as Saba,
Lagariman [I believe that's west Germanic], Farnobius [some branch of
Iranian], etc. If Saba wasn't considered a Goth, then there would be no
reason to demand that he sacrifice to Gothic tribal gods. Third, there's
some suggestion of escaped slaves joining the Goths.

But the tribal name Vesi turns up in the eastern Notitia Dignitatum, in
the 390s, and iirc in a few other texts of the same period.


 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20131205/36c8154e/attachment.htm>