From: tgpedersen
Message: 61315
Date: 2008-11-03
>I wonder what kind of self-inflicted spell has led you to believe that
> 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.