Re: [tied] Re: Spread of Early Germanic

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From: x99lynx@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, March 29, 2002 7:06 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: Spread of Early Germanic

> 1. - Does Gothic (Ulfila's Gothic mainly) show much lexical adstrate at all?  Even the Greek loans are predominantly religious.  Could it be that Gothic was a language that for whatever reason was not prone to borrow?

 

Yes, there are just a handful of loans from Iranian and Slavic (of course there were numerous loans _from_ Gothic into Slavic, the latter being a low-prestige langaue at the time). Wulfila's Greek loans are mostly what you say -- learned religious terms, not evidence of early adstratal influence. There are a few popular ones, perhaps, including <ulbandus> 'camel', which is no other than <elepHant-> with aberrant phonology, borrowed also in almost the same form and with the same shift of meaning by West Germanic and Slavic (OE olfend, OHG olbanta, Sl. *velIbo~dU [and distortions thereof]; all certainly from the same intermediate source).

> 2. Is there a Germanic adstrate in Gothic?  If any convergence occurred among "East" Germanic tribes, would it show as it does in Southern Slavic?  Is there an adstrate attributable to NW Germanic? My best understanding is that the relationship with OHG and OE look vertical for the most part, from a common ancestor.  Perhaps that might argue that Gothic was isolated from most such borrowings, whatever the source?

 

Any Germanic adstrate would be hard to detect. First, we know next to nothing about the langauges of the Bastarnae, Quadi, Marcomanni, etc. Secondly, if they were closely related to Gothic, loans would not stand out clearly among native Gothic lexemes.

> 3. The Gothic words for wine and olive bother me. (E.g., wein, sn. OE, OHG, win; Lat, vinum.)   Why would Gothic borrow these words from Latin, given where the first real life contacts would have occurred for the Goths at least.  Perhaps, over many generations, the source of borrowed words simply changed.

 

Like <kaisar> (OHG keisar, OE ca:sere), these loans are so ancient that they can be regarded as virtually Proto-Germanic. The vocabulary of of trade, like that of political power, spreads fast even without direct contact. There are, for example, numerous Roman imports in the 3rd-century Maslomecz graves in eastern Poland, and these include at least one wine amphora (Maslomecz, grave #90).

> 4. And finally, given how much we have on Thracian, Dacian, Sarmatian, etc., is it possible that we would not recognize such borrowings, especially if they were borrowed early and then adopted later in the west Germanic?

 

But Sarmatian loans _are_ recognisable, even if they spread to West Germanic (one of them is English <path>; its a post-Grimm loan, and therefore Sarmatian/Alanic rather than Scythian). Words with unclear etymologies always attract the attention of linguists, and I doubt if Thracian or Dacian loans could pass for native Germanic lexemes. The well-known cases of etymologically obscure words in Germanic are not restricted to Gothic or even to Gothic and West Germanic.

 

Piotr