Re: Bastarni and Slavs (Was: IE & Uralic)

--- ualarauans <ualarauans@...> wrote:

> I didn't know there are some Bastarnian words
> attested. Where?

****GK: In Livy and Polybius I think. Nothing much:
names of Bastarnian kings in the 2nd c. BCE.****

>
> > The
> > argument is largely historical. The assumption is
> that
> > Gothic and Bastarnian would have been
> linguistically
> > fairly close, and that Bastarnians interacted with
> > East Balts and Proto-Slavs for centuries before
> the
> > arrival of the Goths.
>
> Afaik the Gothic loans in Slavic bear characteristic
> traits of
> Gothic phonetics as distinguished from the rest of
> Germanic. If it
> was Bastarnian as you suggest and as Shchukin's
> hypothesis goes, it
> must have been indeed very close to Gothic,
> virtually the same
> language I'd say. But then, you postulate for
> Bastarnian centuries
> of independent development, and that in the area of
> active contacts
> with non-Germanic idioms. It doesn't look plausible
> being put
> together, somehow.

****GK: We don't know very much about Bastarnian
relations with the rest of the Germanic world in the
period in question. It's highly doubtful they were
insulated. And the same problem exists re the Goths,
whose contacts with non-Germanic idioms were quite
intense. What sways me here is the indubitable fact
that large numbers of Bastarnians would have
participated in the Slavic ethnogenetic process (acc.
to the Shchukin hypothesis) from its earliest phases,
whereas the contacts with the Goths were less
intimate. Nothing is certain, of course, and the
question remains largely open. Everything could have
happened differently. Though the Carpathian and
Visla-Oder alternatives have become almost entirely
indefensible, for historical and archaeological
reasons.****

>
> Does Shchukin consider Bastarni East Germanic?

****GK: I'm not sure he even considers them Germanic
(:=)) (or Celtic for that matter). He wrote somewhere
"The Bastarni were the Bastarni. Period." The above is
largely my adaptation of his view, accepting the
notion that the names of the Bastarnian kings retained
by history were indeed Germanic, and that the Sciri of
the Olbian Protogen Decree were early Bastarnians.****

> > BTW my mistake about the
> > "Stavani" (I'm working exclusively from memory):
> not
> > Pliny's but Ptolemy's. Thus ca. 140/150 AD
>
>

Yes, it's in his Geographia, III.5.9 STAUANOI,

> together with
> GALINDAI and SOUDINOI which two are definitely
> Baltic. If STAUANOI
> is indeed a reflex of the Slavic selfname, it
> doesn't exclude
> *Slove^ne as a proto-form. Rendering Slavic [o] with
> foreign (Greek,
> Gothic, whatever) [a] was absolutely standard in
> Common Slavic epoch.

****GK: It's just that Ptolemy's "Stavani" reflects
nicely the Iranian (and Indo-Aryan acc. to Trubachov)
meaning "famed", "glorious" (Slavic "Slava"), a nice
name for elite warriors. Reaching Ptolemy through an
Iranian (Alanic or Aorsan) filter.****

>
> You know ibidem there is another suspectedly Slavic
> name SOUOBHNOI
> (VI.14.9), listed together with ALANOI SKUQAI and
> ALANORSOI, this
> time with Greek omicron in the first syllable. It
> has been
> hypothesized about *Svobe^ne > *Slove^ne, originally
> from PIE
> *swe-/*swo- + -bh- "proper", "own" > "belonging to
> the same kin"
> (cf. Germanic Suebi). What do you make of it?
>
> Of course there is still some chance that both names
> have nothing to
> do with Slavs.

****GK: There is also the Baltic root meaning "slow
flow" which some have used to interpret "Slavs" as
"people of the rivers".****

>
> Ualarauans
>
>

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