[gothic-l] The Gothic equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon Thegn

Fri Mar 20 20:12:33 UTC 2015

Dear Johann, 

 Sorry. My question was rhetorical. There is in fact no evidence. The early Germanic cognates do not allow one to reconstruct the specific meaning 'comitatus;' at best, one must settle for 'host, retinue (of some kind)', although 'comitatus' certainly could be subsumed in this broad semantic field:

 Gothic: drauhti-witoth 'military service'
 ON: drott 'household, people; host of the king's men, bodyguard of a king'
 OE: dryht 'people, multitude, army'
 OFris: drecht 'wedding entourage'
 OS: druht-folk 'army'
 MHG: truht 'troop, squad, platoon'

 Edmund

---In Gothic-L at yahoogroups.com, <anheropl0x at ...> wrote :

 There isn't. As far as I know. That's why I said what I said. Although gmail decided to make the text super tiny for some unknown reason.

 On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 2:36 PM, edmundfairfax at ... mailto:edmundfairfax at ... [gothic-l] <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com mailto:gothic-l at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
   Dear Johann,

 Where is the evidence that *druhtiz means specifically a 'comitatus' and not merely 'host, band, multitude' broadly?

---In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com mailto:gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, <anheropl0x at ...> wrote :

 This probably won't add too much, but I did find this on the wiki.

"The Germanic term for the comitatus is reconstructed as *druhtiz, with Old English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English forms dryht and druht, and Scandinavian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_languages drótt.[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comitatus_%28classical_meaning%29#cite_note-3" Obviously *druhtiz became *drauhts in Gothic. But whether or not it did retain the older meaning, or if comitatus and *druhtiz actually do mean the same thing, I'm not yet sure. I'll try to look into it though.

 On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 1:30 PM, Marja Erwin marja-e at ... mailto:marja-e at ... [gothic-l] <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com mailto:gothic-l at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
   On Mar 20, 2015, at 1:50 PM, edmundfairfax at ... mailto:edmundfairfax at ... [gothic-l] <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com mailto:gothic-l at yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 > As European history during the last 1500 years clearly shows, Christians have been no less warriorlike or militaristic than the infidel or heathen. Need I mention the Crusades, amongst many other examples?
 > 
 > Edmund

 But Christianity covers a lot of ground. We’d need to figure out what the evidence says about Gothic Christianity, in particular, and which pattern that would fit in other branches of Christianity.

 So what evidence do we have?

 1. The Passion of St. Saba and the other martyrologies.

 2. Reading-choice and word-choice in the Gothic bible.

 3. The claim that Wulfila was the son, or perhaps the grandson, of slaves.

 4. The claim that Wulfila did not translate the four books of Kings.

 5. The personal names of known Gothic Christians. Alareiks, of course, was named (or named himself) -reiks, but few known Christians of the previous generation had been so named, and some had been named (or named themselves) -thius.

 I think that’s enough to show a conversion from below, and a degree of conflict with existing power structures, and possibly with existing military institutions.

 I don’t think that’s enough to show whether or not they were leaning towards a peace church pattern before 376, and that had definitely changed by 395.

-- 
 Glaðliga ríða Noregs męnn til Hildar þings.

-- 
 Glaðliga ríða Noregs męnn til Hildar þings.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20150320/634c79ed/attachment.htm>