Whoever this Hugh Bibbs, BA,
is
his linguistic speculation ignores all
current scholarship and for that reason deserves to be ignored in turn. The
Jutes were not called Jeats in Old English, for one thing. Bede Latinised
their name as <iuti>/<iutae>, sixth-century Franko-Latin
sources called them <eutii> or <eucii>, and in Old English itself
they were called <e:otan> or <e:otas>, dialectally also
<i:otas>, <i:utan> (with falling diphthongs like [e:&] [i:&]
or [i:u], not with an initial [j]!). Jutland (in Denmark) was called Jótland in
Old Icelandic as opposed to Gautland (in Sweden), with jó < *eu. All these
names point to early Germanic *eut- with alternative strong or weak masculine
endings, i.e. to the stem forms *eut-a-, *eut-o:n- (a common kind of variation
in Germanic tribal names, cf. pl. Seaxe or Seaxan). The Frankish versions
suggest the (Latinised) collective *eut-ija-, also to be expected. Our modern
form <Jutes> comes from mediaeval Latin Iuti/Iutae, where the <i>
came to be pronounced as a glide and was "hardened" in the French
pronunciation of Latin.
Initial <g> (the normal modern
transliteration of the yogh letter, which was simply the form of G in Old
English and was also used in words like <god>, <Grendel> or
<cyning>) was indeed palatalised before front vowels in Old English, so
the actual pronunciation became [jæ:at] (< early OE [gjæut], from still
earlier *gaut(az)). At this point the word became phonetically similar
to <e:ot-> [i:&t], though not identical with it, and since the Jutes
were only a historical memory by that time as founders of the Kentish dynasty,
the names came to be misidentified occasionally by late Anglo-Saxon authors, or
to be more precise the name <ge:atas> was sometimes used instead of
<e:otas> for one of the groups that had colonised England (but
never <e:otas> for the Swedish Gauts, to my knowledge!), thus e.g. in the
Late West Saxon translation of Bede (but not in the original).
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 1:09 AM
Subject: [tied] Bring back the real Piotr!
... and when he comes back, I hope he gives the
Gasiorowski
Definitive Statement as to this Bibbs Jute/Geat business.
Maybe I
have read too many Nineteenth Century books for my own good, but up
until now I'd always assumed that these Iotes Iutes chaps were one
and
the same to them Beowulf folks, and had just moved around a bit.
All
on the same grounds as this invocation of the 'funny g', as in
the one the
Gaelic speakers use now.
William Butler Jutes
;o)
Steve said;
<<<ge:atas> in Beowulf and
Widsith>>
I have a note here that from an H. Bibbs: "The name Geats is
actually zeats, and the yogh, "z", is pronounced "y" before fronting vowels, so
the correct transcription would be Yeats, which is close enough to Jeats (Jutes)
to be argued that they are one and the same." I'm as likely to believe H. Bibbs,
whoever he is, at this point. So I don't find anything here you say more
convincing.