From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 61327
Date: 2008-11-03
>I don't get it: where's the "extra-Germanic" in what Piotr has said?
>
> >
> > 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.
>
> I wonder what kind of self-inflicted spell has led you to believe that
> a claim that a Germanic word has extra-Germanic ancestry can be
> refuted with a line of reasoning which includes as a premise the
> assumption that it doesn't?
>
>
> Torsten
>