Piotr wrote:
<<No, Goofy.>>
You are a smart guy, Piotr. But you can turn a little nasty if things don't
go your way.
Piotr also wrote:
<<The Gauts were "Gauts" and nothing else. The fact that amateurs confuse
references in ancient sources (which were not very clear about the identity
of Scandia) to the "Gut-" people of Gotland (and the Goths) and the "Gaut-"
people of Götaland does not mean that a linguist has a right to confuse them
as well. True, there were 19th-century Anglo-Saxonists who identified the
Geats in Beowulf with the Gotlanders, the Goths or even the Jutes, but we
know better than that now.>>
Just think about what you are saying here. "The fact that amateurs confuse
references in ancient sources (which were not very clear about the identity
of Scandia) to the "Gut-" people of Gotland (and the Goths) and the "Gaut-"
people of Götaland..."
Amateurs confuse references to Gauts and Guts. 19th-century Anglo-Saxonists
confuse references to Geats and Guts, Jutes and Goths.
But wait!! according to Piotr, the "ancient sources" had them all correct and
straight !!!! Obviously, they were professional linguists (who probably
never heard the words spoken by Germanic speakers) who had the modern day
linguistic advantage over 19th-century Anglo-Saxonists and could mysteriously
tell the difference between Gutes, Gauts, Geats, Jutes, Goths, Gountoi,
Gutones, Gothones, Gotones, Gutae, Gountigots, etc., even though they were a
thousand miles away and speaking some very different languages.
Piotr, you are doing what the Atlanteans do. You are just doing it with a
more arcane mysticism to get at your results. The ancient text tell all! You
just have to have the magical knowledge to read them.
The truth of the matter is that we really don't know that any of these names
did not pass through many speakers and even written forms before they reached
any of your ancient sources. The variations in these words may NOT have been
created by different people but just confusion about far away people with
strange sounding names.
The words themselves may not have at that time even reflected any kind of
early self-name, but might be what neighbors called these people (a very,
very common occurence in naming.) We don't even know if these were in fact
names of people, but rather names of places attached to the people who lived
there. Or references to other features that had nothing to do with the
self-name of a people.
The fact is that we do not know that these names were not loose terms that
flopped about in a whole range of dialects that did not survive or third or
fourth languages that were what REALLY created any difference between Gaut
and Gut that may show up in ancient texts. (We do know that this is precisely
what happened with the name Volcae > welsh and vlakh.) Or that the
difference between gaut and gut was not created later on when such names were
standardized, perhaps even based on the same "sacred" ancient texts Piotr
cites.
Piotr also wrote:
<<As for the Gauts, who were a rather famous people, there is really no need
to make your own garbled variants of a name that is attested very clearly
since early times: e.g. <gautoi> in Procopius (6th c.), <ge:atas> in Beowulf
and Widsith, <gautar> in Old Icelandic and <gøtar> in Old Swedish. Since you
have no problems with the methods of historical linguistics, you should be
glad to learn that all therse forms reflect the same prototype: *gauta- with
strong masculine endings (not to be confused, but alas often confused, with
*gut(-o:n)- 'Goth').>>
I think you may have confused yourself, Piotr. Old Icelandic and Old
Swedish are what 1200+ years later than Ptolemy and supposedly referred to
the same difference between the same peoples more than a thousand years
earlier? So you are trying to tell me that you know that "gut" and "gaut"
were words that were never confused for more than a thousand years and that
YOU KNOW therefore that these Gauts were never, ever called Gutae, Goutoi,
Gothones or Gothi by Latin or Greek scribes 1200 years earlier, who wrote in
a different language a thousand miles away and heard or read the words third
hand at best. I can hear more variation in the English word "got" on the
streets of New York then you allow for in a millenium and a half of
multi-lingual Scandinavian speech.
This is just not believeable. You are totally overstating what you can know
and I think doing linguistics a disservice by making incredible claims for
methodology that cannot tell you these things.
Piotr also writes:
<<gautoi> in Procopius (6th c.).>
Well, given all the opportunities the ancient scholars had to give it a shot,
I'm sure you would have found one who finally hit on the right combination.
What is blazingly obvious here is that you are being capriciously selective
with what you use. You conveniently disregard the Latin transcriptions of
Ptolemy (alternating <gutae> and <gautae>) even though they clearly indicate
that the two forms were interchangeable. There's no reason to think that
Procopius was particularly concerned with differentiating between <gautoi>
and <gutoi> in Scandinavia. A good bet is that he was copying from a Latin
copy of Ptolemy that listed the name as <gautae>.
(Interesting here is that if Procopius actually was rendering a Germanic
written spelling (a la Wulfila) with <au>, the transliteration to Greek would
have been <o>. Wulfila generally transliterated Greek <o>s into Gothic as
<au>. So in Greek perhaps this would read "gotoi" or even "gothoi.")
<<<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.
The odds are that <gaut> and <gut> were often confused among the "ancient
writers" and probably among Scandinavians until recent times and nothing
Piotr writes really even remotely suggest otherwise.
You know, there was a time when I read the messages of Piotr Gasiorowski with
admiration and respect. I even saved the posts he did on the h3 on other
issues. Now I read his post and I don't even recognize the same guy. I
suspect the real Piotr was kidnapped and the editors at JIES put a puffering,
pontificating, overstating duplicate in his place.
Bring back the real Piotr!
Steve Long