On 2008-11-03 02:09, Andrew Jarrette wrote:
> I think one has to be careful about the Old English forms in this
> case. Spellings with <iu-> can sometimes stand for /ju:-/, as in
> <Iu:de:as> "the Jews", and in <iuc>, <iung>, <iu:>, alternative
> spellings for <geoc> "yoke", <geong> "young", <geo:> "formerly"; one
> also finds <ioc>, <iong>, and <io> for these same words, all with Gmc
> *j-; also the word <ge:oc> "help, support, rescue; safety;
> consolation" is sometimes spelt <e:oc>, and the word <i:esend>
> "viscera" is also spelt <ge:sen>; one may conclude from these
> variations that it is at least possible, if not plausible, that these
> OE spellings of the tribal name "Jutes" represent a word that had *j-
> in Germanic (and which might have been imperfectly transmitted to the
> non-Jutish Angles and Saxons, who might have spelt it also imperfectly
> according to their conventions).
Spelling confusion between word-initial <eo, ea> and <geo, gea> is only
found in some late WS and Nbr. texts because of the dialectal shift of
prominence to the second element of the diphthong. Hogg (1992) gives the
following examples: <gealgodon, gearfoðe, geornustlice, a-gi:ode> for
<ealgodon, earfoðe, eornustlice, a-e:ode> and <e:oc, eador> for <ge:oc,
geador>. Such spellings are few and far between. The vast majority of
<eo-, io-, ea-, ie-> words with an etymological initial vowel are never
spelt with a <g>, and the loss of <g> for the palatalised reflex of
PGmc. *G- is even rarer. <eorþe> and <geolu> are common words, but we
never find them spelt *<georþe> and *<eolu>.
Of course, in words with etymological <ju(:)> the spelling <iu->
(preferred in LWS) varied with <geo-> (EWS), <giu-> (Nbr.), <gu->
(Mer.), <gio-> (Kt.) (the dialectal preferences are rather clear though
far from absolute). But, as regards the Jutes, we don't find *Ge:ot-,
*Giut-, *Giot- or the like in any of the primary souces. The only
exception is the curious conflation of the Jutes with the Geats in the
WS translation of Bede, where the 9th-c. translator renders Bede's
<Iuti/Iutae> as Geatas in the famous fragment referring to the events of
AD 449 (where the name occurs three times, if I remember correctly).
Later on in the text, where things other than the ancestry of the
English people are discussed, he uses the normal and expected WS form,
<Eote>. Even towards the end of Old English, in the LWS Worcester
Chronicle, we still have the regular development of the word to <Y:t->
(to wit, <Ytene> 'of the Jutes'). And indeed the only forms that we find
throughout attested OE are <E:ot-, I:ut-, I:ot-, Y:t-> with various
plural inflections (<-e>, <-as> or <-an>, as with several other ethnic
names).
Craig R. Davis (Anglo-Saxon England 35, 2006) argues that the Alfredian
translator knew very well the precise equivalent of Bede's <Iut-> in his
dialect but identified the Jutes with the Geats deliberately, in
accordance with the political preferences of the time. At the end of the
8th c. Gothic connections became fashionable in Britain, and since the
Geats had by that time become identified with the Goths among learned
people, Geat began to displace Woden as the most desired ancestor in
Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies. Alfred himself traced his descent back to
the Jutish kings of the Isle of Wight through his maternal grandfather
Oslac, and Alfred's mother, in particular, seems to have been very proud
of her ancestry. The identification of the Jutes with the "Gothic"
Geats, with a little help from late OE phonetics, certainly pleased the
king. The romantic aura radiated by the Goths seems to have a charmed
life of its own: it has now cast a spell upon Torsten's mind.
Piotr