From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 14787
Date: 2002-08-29
----- Original Message -----From: x99lynx@...Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2002 3:09 PMSubject: [tied] Re: Question re a Germanic Name (Suartuas)> So if I was writing in Gothic and I wanted to say that the Fifth Horesman's name was "Hatred", a substantive, what would I write? (fija<thorn>wa, hatred < fijan, to hate.) (Of course, <th>wa is a Gothic construction and you would not expect it specifically in other Germanic languages.)I don't think he could have been called that. The Germani were rather meticulous about the grammatical gender of names. Fijaþwa wouldn't do, but any masculine derivative would.> Is going by ON naming practices unnecessarily limiting, especially for the period and time in question?I also gave an OHG example (Swarto, corresponding to ON Svarti); others were ON simply because there are more such examples there. One could easily imagine Goth. *Swarta or OE Swearta; the latter is in fact attested!> If an East Germanic speaker took a conversion name like "Honorarius" or just plain "Honor", how would he translate that to 'Gothic'? (swe:ran, to honor) Substantives do appear in northern Germanic tradition, although not necessarily in connection with northern kings. Saxo calls the legendary Danish king "Frotho" or "Frothius" (Peace).The 'peace' word was <friðr> (masculine in ON, like OHG fridu, OS friþu and OE friþ, and found in macho names like Sigfriðr 'victorious peace'). "Frotho" = ON Fróði, derived from an adjective meaning 'wise, clever' (OE fro:d) -- a name made famous by Tolkien, whose Frodo = OE Fro:da. Any Germanic child could turn an adjective into a personal name by adding weak-noun inflections. This is how we make OHG Swarto out of <swart>.> How would a "Gothic" speaker translate an adopted name that meant substantive 'sworn,
oath, pledge, faith' (from swaran, to swear)?Definitely Swara (*swar-o:n-), like *far-o:n- > Fara/Faro/Fari from <faran> 'travel'.
<<Since *swart-o:n- is a plausible and attested name (Swarto, ON Svarti), I'm inclined to think that the reflex of *-o: in the nom.sg. *swarto: may have been a high vowel in the dialect in question, hence the -u-[y] (plus a Greek extension).>>
> How does that jive with the first -u- in Suartuas? Shouldn't it consistently be S[w]art[w]as? Or S[y]art[y]as? (Based on this high vowel idea, I'm curious as to how Procopius would have transliterated a word like OHG 'triuwida', truth.)<Suartuas> _is_ a consistent spelling, isn't it? (I only indicated the Ancient Greek pronunciation of ypsilon in square brackets.) What I mean is that something like Germanic [swartu], with [swarta] (or similar) in the oblique cases may have suggested a stem like Gk. hypocoristic Ze:na:s, gen. Ze:na:, i.e. Suartua:s, Suartua:. I'm only speculating, of course, since there aren't enough Greek versions of Herulian names to provide parallel examples.
Piotr