"Sergejus Tarasovas" <S.Tarasovas@...> :
<<I see your point, but Gothic as written by Wulfila is a concrete
entity, while "Germanic" is too a vague notion to associate with it a
specific "writing formula", extrapolated from Wulfila's writing
system created specifically for Gothic, not the abstract "Germanic".
And the scenario you propose actually takes an "ancient scribe" who
apparently has read some Gothic texts (as he is aware of the
orthographic correspondence in question) being not aware of the
actual Gothic letter-sound correspondencies, from which one can
conclude he has no knowledge of Gothic language at all (reading texts
in an unknown language is a strange kind of hobby, I must say). Yet
he somehow knows that, eg, the Gothic grapheme that looks approx.
like Latin minuscule <n> corresponds to Greek <ypsilon> and Latin
<u>. Then the same scribe reading a text in Greek or Latin (because
it's too early for a text in a Germanic language proper to be written
down) comes across an ethnonym and interprets it as being written on
principle of the Gothic orthography (being sure that all pertinent to
Gothic is pertinent to any other Germanic language as well) and, re-
writing the text (or writing his own text), translates the Gothic
orthogramme into a Latin one (he knows of Greek-Gothic orthographic
correspondencies only, but Greek and Latin are one and the same thing
as to the orthography to him). Too many assumptions (and not the most
probable ones), in my opinion, for the scenario to be viable.>>
A couple of things. One is that whole sentences Germanic were not
transliterated into Latin, so were just dealing with special words like
<apostle>, whose written form change when they appeared in Gothic. And of
course we're dealing with lonely words like <gautoi> that appeared singularly
in Latin or Greek texts. All that is needed is for a copyist to have been
told the rule <au> to <o> and apply it to a single word. As far as Gothic
not being abstract "Germanic", that's something we know but the scribe would
not. To him Germanic and Gothic could possibly the same thing. The real
problem with the scenario is that Wulfila's writings would have had no such
reach or influence among those who might set such rules of redaction for
scribes/copyists. And it probably did not matter much at the time.
Jordanes, who DID come from a long line of scribes working for a Skiri
leader, shows that such bi-lingual writers/secretaries were not particularly
concerned with getting either spelling or sounds precisely right.
Regards,
Steve Long