On 2007-12-09 12:54, ualarauans wrote:
> There's an article by Tomasz Czarnecki dealing with Gothic loans in
> Polish [http://www.fh.ug.gda.pl/images/Czarnecki.pdf%5d. He lists Polish
> Gdan'sk and Torun' under the category of "mögliche Entlehnungsfälle"
> (pp. 11-13). Now if these settlement names are indeed Gothic, they
> must have survived the later Slavic colonization of what is now Poland.
I don't understand Czarnecki's suggestion concerning Torun' (there seems
to be some kind of complex typo due to problems with fonts), so it's
difficult to comment on it. The alleged Gothic prototype of the name of
Gdan'sk is given first as "*gudiscandja", then (more correctly)
"*gutiskandja" (it would actually have been something like *gutisks
andeis in Wulfilan terms, from *Gutiskaz anDijaz). I'm very sceptical
about the possibility of deriving anything like *gUdanIskU from that
without shuffling the segments up in a way that strains credibility.
Other geographical names mentioned in the article include the rivername
Tanew. I used to believe myself that it looked liked a borrowing from
Gothic, but see:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/28324
Not that I dismiss all that material. Many of those Gothic (well, let's
say early (East) Germanic) sources are fully plausible.
Piotr