Re: Res: [tied] Another lame idea on Slavic migration and Ariovistus

> > As some may have noted I think the Slavs spread to their present
> > sites as the Charudes (= Croats) of Ariovistus' army. Here comes
> > something in the same vein:
> >
> > Caesar, DBG, 1, 37
> > 'Haec eodem tempore Caesari mandata referebantur et legati ab
> > Haeduis et a Treveris veniebant: Haedui questum quod Harudes, qui
> > nuper in Galliam transportati essent, fines eorum popularentur:
> > sese ne obsidibus quidem datis pacem Ariovisti redimere potuisse;
> > Treveri autem, pagos centum Sueborum ad ripas Rheni consedisse,
> > qui Rhemum transire conarentur; his praeesse Nasuam et Cimberium
> > fratres. '
> >
> > "At the same time that this message was delivered to Caesar,
> > ambassadors came from the Aedui and the Treviri; from the Aedui
> > to complain that the Harudes, who had lately been brought over
> > into Gaul, were ravaging their territories; that they had not
> > been able to purchase peace from Ariovistus, even by giving
> > hostages: and from the Treviri, [to state] that a hundred cantons
> > of the Suevi had encamped on the banks of the Rhine, and were
> > attempting to cross it; that the brothers, Nasuas and Cimberius,
> > headed them."
> >
> > AFAIK, there exists no satisfying etymology, Germanic or
> > otherwise, for a name 'Nasua'.
> >
> > But:
> > Polish naswa,
> > Czech název,
> > Slovak názov
> > Slovenian naziv
> > Serbian naziv
> > (Bulgarian nazvanie) "name"
> > (from *na-zUva-ti "call, name" vel sim.)
> >
> > So what I think happened was that hundred villages of Slavic
> > Charudes (led by Suevi) were attempting to cross the Rhine headed
> > by Ariovistus(?) brother, named Cimberius, and that the message
> > got garbled on its way through translators.
>

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Joao S. Lopes" <josimo70@...> wrote:
>
> Cimberius = Cymry?
> Nasuas < *nes- to save? cf. Nasatya, Nestor? <*Naswant-?
>

Pokorny has two forms of
*nas- "sich verenigen, geborgen sein", ie "unite, be hidden"
with suffix -w- or -u-, none of them Germanic:

1. *νασ-Fός:
Doric thess. να:ός,
Lac. να:Fος,
Lesb. να:υ~ος (ie. νάFFος),
Ion. νηός,
Att. νεώς m.
"(Götterwohnung [abode of gods] =) Tempel, Heiligtum [sanctuary]";

2. Toch A nas.u "Freund"

So unless you want to argue that one of the leading brothers was Greek or Tocharian and the other one Celtic(?)/Cimbrian(?), I don't think I'll agree with your proposal.

Details of what I think happened:

The only items of information in the message from the Treveri which couldn't have been obtained by direct observation are
1. the names of the 'two leaders' and
2. the type and number of their provenance (the hundred pāgī).

Since the Suevi referred to in the massage from the Treveri came from further north (they lived in pāgī, ie. they were civilians, not soldiers, cf.
Ernout-Meillet
'pāgus, -ī m.: borne fichée en terre (cf. pangō),
sens qui apparaît encore dans Vg. G. 2, 382
praemiaque ingeniis pagos et compita circum |
Thesidae posuere
(mais il y a peut-être ici influence de πάγος);
de là "territoire rural délimité par des bornes, district".
Souvent joint à uīcus, qui désigne le centre des habitations. -

Ancien, usuel.
Celt.: britt. pau.

Dérivés:
pāgānus, -a, -um: relatif aux pāgī: -a lex;
subst. pāgānus, -ī m.: habitant du pāgus, paysan (class.).
De pāgānus dérivent:
Pāgānālia n.pl. "fêtes du pāgus" (Varr.),
pagānicus, -a, -um: appartenant au village, villageois;
-a (sc. pila): balle de nature particulière employée d'abord par les paysans,
cf. Rich, s.u.; Iuppiter -us; -ae feriae.

Composé:
se:mipāgānus (Mart., Prol.);
pāgātim (comme uīcātim).

Pāgānus dans la l. militaire a pris le sens de "civil" par opposition au soldat qui était castre:nsis;
cf. notre "civil" ou "bourgeois".
Dans la l. de l'Église, les pāgī étant demeurés longtemps rebelles à la christianisation, pāgānus a désigné le "païen" (comme gentīlis). On a supposé aussi que ce sens avait été créé en opposition avec. mīles Christī; v. en dernier lieu A. Piganiol, L'Empire chrétien, p.382, et n. 104.
C'est avec ce sens que le mot est passé dans les l. romanes, cf. M.L.6141, et
en irl.: pagan.

A ce sens se rattache
pāgānitās "paîenneté" (Cod. Theod.), et
pāgānismus hybride formé à l'aide du suffixe gr. en -ισμός sur le type
χριστιανισμός (St-Aug.).

L'emprunt de pāgānus en germ. au sens de "cheval de ferme",
westph. page,
est peu sûr.

Bâti sur castre:nsis, pace:nsis, apparaît en bas latin un adj.
pāge:nsis (Greg., Tur.),
dont proviennent
it. paese, fr. pays, etc., cf. M.L. 6145.
L'existence de *pagīnus, M.L. 6148, est douteuse.',

likely from wherever Ariovistus came from in Silesia, where settlements disappear at the same time, not from the war-torn territory to the right of the Rhine and south of the Main, communication beyond the most basic level between the occasional prisoner taken by the Treveri and his interrogators would have
been impossible. They would have been the Charudes Ariovistus at the later meeting tells Caesar he is expecting to arrive within the near future. So the only words that they would have been able to pick out from an answer to 'who is our leader?' (sign language, slap-slap) would have been
'brāti' ("brother", misunderstood as "brothers"),
'naswa' "name", misunderstood as a name of a person, and
'kimberi', also misunderstood as a name of a person,
when the poor wretch tried to tell them that his people and the Cimbri were 'brothers', or
that the name of their leader actually was Cimberius, or,
if he mixed in a Latin(?)/Germanic(?) word that their leader was a *kampi-ari, cf.
Lat. campiō, -nis,
PGmc *kampjō,
OHG kempfo "warrior",
now German Kämpfer.


So much for 1., the names of the 'two leaders'

As for 2., the hundred pāgī, I'll have to assume that information item came from another POW ;-). But whatever the real meaning of the *pāg- like word of the information source was, the appearance of the foreigners trying to cross the Rhine can't have been grossly discordant with a description of them as coming from pāgī, ie. as civilians.


Torsten