# Etymology of Goth



## CyrusSH

Etymonline mentions Old Norse _*gotar*_ "men" but it says: The sense 'men' is usually taken to be the secondary one, but as the etymology of the word is unknown, this is uncertain.

Could it be related to Old Iranian *_Gau-tarza-_ (literally “Ox-crusher”): گودرز - Wiktionary ?


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## Treaty

No. The root is _got_- (<*_ʒut_-) missing half of your proposed word (the _ar _is a suffix, I guess a plural/collective suffix). Orel lists a speculated relation with *_ʒeutanan "_to pour" (a semantic shift like to pour > to populate > people?) which is from PIE *_ĝheu._


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## CyrusSH

Plural form of Goth is Gotarar.


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## Treaty

CyrusSH said:


> Plural form of Goth is Gotarar.


I'm not an expert in Old Norse, but I'm sure it is not the same as *New *Norwegian (*Ny*norsk, that you linked). I assume that, because of rhotacism, the final [r] in ON was [z] in PGrm, that can be plural cases and singular nominative, among other things (in cases I know, the ON singular is just -_r_, but the plural is -_ar,_ that's why I assumed _gotar_ may be plural). In short, the ON word for "Goths" *doesn't *even contain [r]. The [r] would appear only in certain grammatical situations (e.g., as the subject _gotar_ = "the Goths", but as genitive _gota_ = "of Goths").


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## berndf

_Got-*ar*_ = Gothic *person*; plural: _Got-ar-*ar*_ = Gothic person*s.
*
In Danish, and hence also in Bokmål (the predominant standard of Norwegian) it is_ Goter_, plural _Gotere_. _-er_ is a derivational suffix meaning _form, belonging to_, similar to English _-ian_.
_Persian (person from Persia) = Perser,
Arab (person from Arabia) = Araber,
Iranian (person from Iran) = Iraner.
German (person from Germany) = Tysker_.


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## Treaty

berndf said:


> _Got-*ar*_ = Gothic *person*; plural: _Got-ar-*ar*_ = Gothic person*s.*


Is it just Nynorsk or also Old Norse?


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## berndf

I guess it is a Low German loan but I am not sure. In ON we find _Gotar_ and _Gutar _for what I understand as the plural.

It could also be the same suffix as in _sing-er _(i.e. ultimately from Latin _-arius_). I don't know.

BTW: Nynorsk does not contrast with Old Norse by with Bokmål (Norsk). Those are two rivalling written standards. While under the Danish Crown, Norwegians communicated in writing in Danish. Bokmål is a standard register and spelling convention of the Norwegian language that remains very close to Danish. Nynorsk is a rival standard that focuses on the spoken language rather than on literary tradition and is generally more archaic.


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## mzp1

How about this then..

Jordanes (a Goth) tells us the Goths are derived, or are the same people, as the Getae. 

Do you think there can be some truth to that? Or was he wrong?


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## Treaty

mzp1 said:


> Jordanes (a Goth) tells us the Goths are derived, or are the same people, as the Getae.


This has been discussed in this thread. Anyway, regarding your question, there is not a single reason to accept him. Historical claims need to at least be either contemporary (directly or indirectly) and/or extracted by scientific means which can reveal the contemporariness and occurrence of events (e.g., radiometry, genetics, historical linguistics, etc). Jordanes's claim - with 700 years time gap, no reference and evidence - is abysmally unfit in either condition.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> _Got-*ar*_ = Gothic *person*; plural: _Got-ar-*ar*_ = Gothic person*s.
> *
> In Danish, and hence also in Bokmål (the predominant standard of Norwegian) it is_ Goter_, plural _Gotere_. _-er_ is a derivational suffix meaning _form, belonging to_, similar to English _-ian_.
> _Persian (person from Persia) = Perser,
> Arab (person from Arabia) = Araber,
> Iranian (person from Iran) = Iraner.
> German (person from Germany) = Tysker_.



Persia, Arabia, Iran and Germany are place names, so Got/Gut was also a place name? In fact Gotar means Gutian?


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## berndf

No, _deutsch_ is an adjective, the names of the people and the country are both derived from it.
_Deutsch = German
Deutscher = German person
Deutschland = German country
_
The literal (historical) meaning of the adjective is _people-ish_ meaning _pertaining to the popular language._


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## CyrusSH

What does _Gotarkrigen_ mean? The first part (gotar) certainly doesn't mean Gothic person.


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## berndf

_The Gothswar _(-_en_ is a definite suffix). Compare Swedisch _Goterkrigen_ and German _Gotenkrieg. _In both languages the infix has unambiguously plural meaning (in Swedish the demonym forming suffix _-er _does not exist).


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## CyrusSH

Shouldn't it be _Gotararkrigen_? Plural form of Goth is _Gotarar_.


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## berndf

I would assume the e in in infix to be deleted _goter(e)krigen_. But I don't know how morphological twists of a more or less artificial 19th century Norwegian rendering of a Danish word, which is in turn a late medieval Low German loan, shed any light of the topic of the thread.


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## berndf

mzp1 said:


> Jordanes (a Goth) tells us the Goths are derived, or are the same people, as the Getae.
> 
> Do you think there can be some truth to that? Or was he wrong?


Jordanes account certainly can't be true. He

identified the Goths with the people who settled the Vistula estuary, according to archaeological evidence between the 1th and 4th century AD, and who, according to him, came from Scandinavia and later moved up the Vistula and settled in the Back Sea area and
identified the Goth with the Gethae, an ethnonym that is attested as of the 5th century BC.
Both can't evidently be true at the same time. There have been different reactions to that. Grimm, e.g., accepted 2. and rejected 1 (as I said in the other thread). But this doesn't agree with what we know today about time and place of the genesis of the Germanic people and language. Later, most people accept 1. and rejected 2. Today, we don't think we know what and if anything at all is correct about this account, which already in Jordanes times lay in a mythical past of the Gothic ethnogenesis. It may well be that the Goths as a people or tribe formed only in the late 2nd century in the Black Sea region as an amalgamation of  and they might have taken their name from former inhabitants of that area, the Gatae. But this is pure speculation. Applying Occam's razor, the idea that _gut- _in the attested Gothic forms _Gut-þiudai _and_ Gutani_ is East-Germanic and cognate with Old Norse _gaut-_, from which _Gotland _is derived, seems the the most likely one.

In the end, we simply don't know where the name came from.


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## CyrusSH

Jordanes never talks about Scandinavia but Scandza which was the name of different islands in the Mediterranean region in the ancient Greek sources, like this one: Ancient Scandia in Kythira island - Greeka.com He says Goths emigrated from this island in 1490 BC. He also talks about the wars between Goths and ancient Egyptians, Persians and etc.


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## berndf

Yes, he said a lot of strange things. I was just mentioning these to points because they are in obvious contradiction to one another.


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## eamp

Jordanes writes a lot of absurd stuff but he very clearly locates Scandza in the north sea opposite the mouth of the Vistula. Then talks a lot about how cold it is and that the northernmost part lies beyond the arctic circle. Please, have you even read the text?


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## CyrusSH

It is funny that you don't believe what Jordanes says about Goths some hundreds years before his era but you believe what he says about the myth of Gothic origin which happened thousands years ago, Scandza and Scandinavia were clearly two different lands, Scandinavia had mentioned as Scatinavia by Pliny hundreds years before Jordanes, according to etymonline, the name of Scandinavia is a mistake for Scadinavia. It is possible that Jordanes thought they were the same lands but as I said we know from the ancient Greek sources that Scandza was the name of different islands in the Mediterranean region.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> It is funny that you don't believe what Jordanes says about Goths some hundreds years before his era but you believe what he says about the myth of Gothic origin which happened thousands years ago


No. Today Jordanes is not considered a reliable source in any respect. He obviously blends oral tradition of his people with a lot of fantasy and we don't know what is what. I have made this more than clear in my previous posts.

The issue now is that you display serious ignorance of *what* he wrote, independently of whether we believe him or not. Your phantasies about an origin of the Goths in the Mediterranean are entirely yours and there is absolutely no way you can relate them to Jordanes' text. I agree with @eamp, you are arguing as if you haven't even read the text at all.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> No. Today Jordanes is not considered a reliable source in any respect. He obviously blends oral tradition of his people with a lot of fantasy and we don't know what is what. I have made this more than clear in my previous posts.
> 
> The issue now is that you display serious ignorance of *what* he wrote, independently of whether we believe him or not. Your phantasies about an origin of the Goths in the Mediterranean are entirely yours and there is absolutely no way you can relate them to Jordanes' text. I agree with @eamp, you are arguing as if you haven't even read the text at all.



You said that Jordanes identified the Goths with the people who ... came from Scandinavia and I said that Jordanes never talks about Scandinavia but Scandza, if you have read the text, please tell me where he talks about Scandinavia? It is easy to play with similar names, for example Jordanes calls Tomyris a Gothic queen because the second part of Massagetae is similar to Goth.


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## berndf

He talks about a cold island in the Northern Ocean opposite the mouth of the Vistula. Who cares what word he used to name it. Just read the text itself and in context.


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## CyrusSH

There are different opinions about this legendary island, for example: Jurate Rosales - Wikipedia


> The island of Scandza, the place of origin of the Gothic poeple, is usually presumed to be Scandinavia, but Rosales says that the Curonian Spit (a thin strip of land along the Baltic Sea that joins modern-day Lithuania with the Kaliningrad Oblast, now a Russian exclave), is more congruent with the description in the Primera Crónica General, based on the Spit's nearness to the lower portion and mouth of the Vistula.



It is also interesting to read it:


> On the linguistic front, she concurs with Gedgaudas according to which the etymology of Goth is from the Baltic verb gaudo, "to catch" or "to trap", which could refer to a man who captures a cow/bull



It sounds similar to the Iranian word that I mentioned in the initial post.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> There are different opinions about this legendary island, for example:


That's about 100 nautical miles from Gotland. Huge difference.

Given the fact that we have no idea if any of this is true it doesn't matter where precisely this mythical northern island is. Historical evidence of the existence of the Goths as a people dates from about 160AD. Germanic society was in flux in the early migration period and tribes formed as quickly as they disappeared again. We have no way of telling how much earlier than that they had existed as an ethnic group. And, hence, we don't know how where they started to use this ethnonym as a self reference.

The only thing we know is that they spoke a language belonging to a sub group of Germanic that must have split from the common Germanic continuum a bit earlier than West and North Germanic because their language lacked certain developments the other branches have in common, like the [z] rhotacization.


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## danielstan

The most important Gothic treasure discovered in Romania has a ring with an inscription (deteriorated by thieves) which reads:

_gutan iowi hailag
_
translated as:

 "sacred (_hailag_) to the Jove (_iowī_, i.e. Thor) of the Goths _gutan(ī)_"

Reference: Ring of Pietroassa - Wikipedia


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## CyrusSH

I see no evidence that Gothic culture came from north to the south, Jordanes says "in the island of Scandza, whereof I speak, there dwell many and divers nations", what did Goths bring to south from these divers cultures? Compare to the Vikings who really brought many things and, from another side, compare to numerous Latin words in Scandinavian languages whenas Romans never conquered this land.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> I see no evidence that Gothic culture came from north to the south


Nobody in this thread argued it did (because it is beside the point for the topic of this thread). We just pointed out that Jordanes said so.


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## lambdalorian

danielstan said:


> The most important Gothic treasure discovered in Romania has a ring with an inscription (deteriorated by thieves) which reads:
> 
> _gutan iowi hailag_
> 
> translated as:
> 
> "sacred (_hailag_) to the Jove (_iowī_, i.e. Thor) of the Goths _gutan(ī)_"
> 
> Reference: Ring of Pietroassa - Wikipedia


Well no.

It is deteriorated so we can't for sure read that. Other proposed readings are:
_gutanī ō_[_þal_] _wī_[_h_] _hailag  (Krause 1966: "sacred (and) inviolable inheritance of the Goths")
Johnsen (1971) translates "the holy relic (= the [altar] ring) of Gutaniō"; Krogmann (1978), reading ᛗ /m/ for ᚹᛁ /wi/, translates "dedicated to the Gothic Mothers (= female guardian spirits of the Goths)"; Antonsen (2002) translates "Sacrosanct of Gothic women/female warriors"._

Construing the damaged rune as ᛋ /s/, Looijenga (1997) reads:
_gutanīs wī_[_h_]_ hailag_
She comments that _gutanīs_ should be understood as an early form of Gothic _gutaneis_, "Gothic", and _wī_[_h_] as early Gothic _weih_, "sanctuary". Following this reading, she translates the whole inscription "Gothic (object). Sacrosanct."[21] Reichert (1993) suggests that it is also possible to read the damaged rune as ᛃ /j/, and interprets it as representative of _j_[_ēra_], thus:
_gutanī j_[_era_] _wī_[_h_] _hailag_
Reichert translates this as "(good) year of the Goths, sacred (and) inviolable _hailag_".[22] Though Düwel (2001) has expressed doubts regarding the meaning of such a statement, Nordgren (2004) supports Reichert's reading, viewing the ring as connected to a sacral king in his role of ensuring an abundant harvest (represented by ᛃ jera).[23] Pieper (2003) reads the damaged rune as ᛝ /ŋ/, thus:
_gutanī_ [_i_(_ng_)]_wi_[_n_] _hailag_
He translates this "[to] Ingwin of the Goths. Holy."

Scholars seem to agree that its language is some form of Gothic and that the intent behind it was religious.
Reference: Ring of Pietroassa - Wikipedia


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