"Goth"

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

[ Moderator's note:
  Two separate messages have been included into a single posting here, so that
  the correction made in the second can be read before replies begin.
  --rma ]

To the list:

The discussion of Celtic borrowed into German causes me brings this up.  I am
having trouble with the shifts in Germanic and how they relate to how the
sounds would change in early times and when borrowed.

The word "Goth" is difficult one.  It would seem that careful linguistics
could help make sense of it's history.  But the different developments that
I've read have been hard to follow.

Basically, the word "Goth" apparently clearly first appears in Greek about
250BC.  That is when it is applied to the "Goths" just north of the Danube.
It seems that in Greek at this earlier time, it is written <Guto:nes> or
<Guthoi>.

In a number of places I see the word reconstructed as from <*Gutos>, sing.,
<*Gutans> pl. (with <t> rather than <thorn>.)  I don't know when this
reconstruction would date to.

In Latin, it will appear about a hundred years after the Greek as pl <Gothi>
(the way Ulfila's biographer apparently spelled it) and at some point I've
read, <Gotthi>.

The OED mentions a form in Gothic, <Got<thorn>iuda>, (Gothic people?) but I
don't see it in either of two Gothic dictionaries and perhaps it is a
construction that is meant to account for the <tthi-> that apparently
sometimes was used in Latin.

Earlier Greek and Latin historians use similar names to refer to people in
other places who may have been "Goths":  Strabo writing in Greek uses
<Buto:nas> which is often interpreted as a mistake for "Guto:nas", Tacitus
mentions the <Gotones>, Ptolemy mentions both <Kw'gnoi> and up in Sweden
<Gau'tai> and something that has been Latinized as "Gythones."

The Goths were sometimes also referred to as the <Getae> (Greek: Getes,
Getae; Latin, Geta, Getae), a name used for an earlier group of people in the
same area (north of the Danube.)  (The <Geats> appear as another northern
Germanic peoples at some point later in time.)

Some derive the name from the <Go:eta> or <Go:te> people or section of
Sweden, Ptolemy's <Gau'tae>.  Ingemar Nordgren has suggested that the name is
derived from the Goeta River in Sweden (deriving it from Gaut's "aelv").

There is a claim that early forms of the name appear within the Roman empire
in two Greek inscriptions from Asia, one using a personal name <<gouththa>>
the other apparently refering to <<...tes romaion arches gouththton te kai
germanon ethnon>> (apparently from the late 3d cent AD in Persia.)

Now, how does this work?  Does it make sense to assume that the name would
have undergone a consonant shift some 600 or so years before and it once
began with /k-/?  (E.g., a leader of the possibly Germanic Bastarnae
mentioned in Livy in the 2d cent BC as being in this region is given the name
in Latin <Cotto>.)

And are there vowel shifts in East Germanic that happen somewhere around this
time that would yield something like /oe/> /u/ or /e/?  And doesn't Latin
favor <thorn> > /t/?  (E.g., Tacitus - "Tuista")  And how would either /u/ or
/oe/ or /o/ turn into /ou/ in Greek?  Is there any reason to think /oe/ > /o/
or /ou/ could happen at this time between Greek or Celtic and Germanic in
transcribing this word?  Is there a conventional comparative solution for any
of this?

How did <*Gutans> ever get to <Gouththton> in Greek?

The entries where I see <gout-> in Greek are called Phrygian borrowings in
Lidell-Scott.  There is a whole set of words in Greek like <goe:ta> and
<getheo> and <gounatos> that would appear to collide with a straight-up use
of the <goeta> form in Greek, if the sounds are in fact the same.

Is there some regular path by which something like "Goeta" or "Geta" or
"Gutan" would be expected to be borrowed into Greek or Latin, so that it
comes out "Goth" in Latin?  Or "Gouththton" in Greek?

Any sense as to how these sounds moved around would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Steve Long

        -------------------- Begin second message --------------------

From: X99Lynx at aol.com
Message-ID: <57.eb1f110.27668ebc at aol.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 15:10:36 EST
Subject: "Goth"- correction
To: Indo-European at xkl.com

Thanks to some bad cutting and pasting I wrote (along with some typos):

<< Now, how does this work?  Does it make sense to assume that the name would
have undergone a consonant shift some 600 or so years before and it once
began with/k-/?  (E.g., a leader of the possibly Germanic Bastarnae mentioned
in Livy in the 2d cent BC as being in this region is given the name in Latin
<Cotto>.) >>

What I actually was asking was whether it makes sense to assume that some of
the original preshift *Gutans/Go:te? words may have shifted to an initial /k/
in some dialectics?  (Ergo the 2d centBC Bastarnae name <Cotto> mentioned
above.) Or that the initial /gau/ or /gu/ or /gou/ actually represented an
earlier /gh/ or /ghw/, with the result > /g(o)/?  (Which might not make any
of this clearer, but at least is more of what I meant.)

Regards,
Steve Long