I wrote:
<<(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.") >>
"Sergejus Tarasovas" <S.Tarasovas@...> (Wed Oct 2, 2002 7:58 am)
<<Not in Greek proper. <au> was just that in Old Greek, and began to
render [av]~[af] in Middle Greek. The reason Wulfila have chosen <au> for
Gothic open [O] is obvious -- Greek <o> was (and still is) a close [o] and
the <o>-grapheme didn't seem to fit.>>
I don't doubt that what you've written is correct, but my point was something
different. Wulfila takes written Greek <o> -- for the reasons you've given
-- and writes it in Gothic (writing) <au>. An ancient scribe dealing ONLY
with writing and aware of this formula reverses the process, without regard
to any Germanic-Latin sound correspondence, which he is unaware of anyway. So
that written Germanic <au> is equivalent to written Latin <o>, and German
<gaunt> is therefore written <got/goth>. No actual sound correspondence
correction necessary or even available within the knowledge of the scribe.
Just a scenario to make a small point.
There is no reason to think that sounds necessarily travel with the written
word by itself, especially early on, when we have no real evidence that
Classical writers were bilingual. There is a town called "Versailles" in
Pennsylvania in the US. The word is pronounced something like "Ver - sails"
by everyone, even those who know their French, a written pronounciation. The
name I think was given by the U.S. Post Office and does not reflect any kind
of French substrate. There is another town in Indiana, if I remember
correctly, Varshigh, an attempt at a phonetic spelling. The fact that sound
correspondence traveled with one and not the other is pure accident. Without
plenty of background information, we would not even know that the two words
had anything to do with one another. Importantly, we certainly don't have
that kind of background information with the ancient texts, which are often
little more than lists of names.
And whether ancient writers were using sound or written correspondence would
probably be just as capricious. I believe that all or most were not
multilingual, unlike Wulfila. Where we do see a consistent sound-based
corespondence between ancient Latin and German, I suspect they may have been
the product of later "redactions" by multi-lingual medieval scribes, who
corrected the Latin or Germanic of the texts to show consistent sound
corespondence they were now aware of. And, since there was no precise or
consistent knowledge of the Germanic sound system among the diverse ancient
writers, we cannot be sure that what they are giving us is anything more than
an unsystematic approximation of what someone else heard and maybe even wrote
in a different language.
Regards,
Steve Long