---
tgpedersen@... wrote:
> > ******GK: One thing I didn't get, for
> > instance, is whether you considered Odin and his
> band
> > of merry men and gals to have been Germanic in
> speech
> > while yet at Asgard.******
> > >
>(Torsten) Strabo calls (as I recall it) the Bastarnae
a kind
> of Germani, which
> may mean that at his time they spoke similar, but
> related tongues.
> Other classical writers say similar things. If the
> name of the people
> and the description of them are anything to go by,
> and the number of
> transportation terms in Greek derived from *bast-,
> they were a
> trading people and may have spoken a trade language,
> a creole, that
> was comparatively easy to learn (cf. English vs.
> German!), and the
> preferred one at the "protected markets" on the
> European watershed
> (Tanew river in south east Poland, etc). Bastarnian
> was probably one
> of the many languages of the twelve peoples "Odin"
> ruled.
*****GK: OK let's stop here and take brief stock. The
Bastarnae were located primarily in the area of
contemporary Moldavia. "Odin" was in "Asgard" or
"Tyrkland", considerably to the East. Are you
suggesting that sometime in the 1rst c. BC (?)"Odin"
ruled all the populations from east of the Volga to
the Bastarnae? There is not the faintest shred of
evidence that anyone held that kind of power here at
that time. Mithradates of Pontus (but he's not "Odin"
right?) controlled not only the Bosphoran Kingdom, but
also the Scythians of the Crimea and Lower Dnipro (at
least he thought he could count on their military
support for his Roman wars. Whether in fact he got
much is questionable), and was allied to the Yazygi
and Roxolani, possibly also to the Thracians of
Burebista before the latter's own glorious years.==
After Mithradates nobody even comes close to what is
postulated for "Odin". And the role of the Bastarnae
as providing some sort of trade creole language is a
baseless assumption. At any rate these "traders" are
not represented in the personal names (hundreds of
them!) preserved in the epigraphy of the northern
Black Sea trading cities: these names are Greek,
Thracian, Iranic. No Germans, Balts or Slavs. "Odin"
as described by Snorri is a will o' the wisp for the
1rst c. BC.******
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