"Goth"

[David L. White]

        I don't have much of a contribution to make here, but since when has
that ever stopped me?  Besides, my adoring public (the hithertofore
unsuspected existence of which Mr. Whting was kind enough to point out to
me) demands it, no doubt.
        Latin does not of course in any meaningful sense have /th/ (thorn),
so the appearance of "th" in Latin must be, if all is in order, from
transliteration from Greek.  The Greeks, for their part, might well have
heard an aspirated /t/ in Gothic as equivalent to their /th/.  Our modern
English pronunciation is of course a spelling pronunciation. Thus the
illusion of a shifted /t/ might be created.  But the Lithuanian borrowed
form has /d/, indicating that only a /d/ to /t/ shift is real.
        As for the vowel, pre-Gothic /au/ might well have changed to some
sort of /o/ in Gothic, depending on what sort of interpretation we take of
Gothic spelling and how it reached its somewhat strange state, but as far as
I know /u/ is out.  (And Greek "ou" is of course a spelling of /u/.)
Gothic /u/ is often from pre-Gothic short /o/, but as far as I know there is
no way that /au/ can be expected to have changed to this.  So this /u/ is
probably some sort of mangling in trans-language transmission.  (I vaguely
recall that the Lithuanian form has /u/.)
        I am one of those who thinks that the "Geats" of Beowulf are Goths,
since Germanic /au/ regularly appears as "ea" (whatever that meant, probably
/aeu/) in Old English.

                                                            Dr. David L. White