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Germanic Lexicon Project
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Author: Peter Tunstall
Email: penteract dot oe dot eclipse dot co dot uk
Date: 2005-03-09 15:09:58
Subject: Re: Please critique my pronunciation of Gothic
> How recent is the Braune/Helm you refer to? The Braune grammar goes way back; the fourth edition was from 1895, for example. Sayce's 1954 appendix to Wright's grammar discusses some of the same pieces of evidence, but comes to different conclusions. For example, he says that the gold ring of Bucharest probably dates to the third century, not the fourth as previously thought.
Fifteenth edition, 1956, though in his Vorwort, K Helm says there've been only minor revisions to this one, as has been the case for the eleventh through to the fourteenth (1939-1953).
A more recent opinion on the Pietroasa ring: "Dated first half 5th c., according to the text in the Catalogue of the exhibition Goldhelm (1994:230)", JH Looijenga: Runes Around the North Sea... (Chapter 5).
http://www.ub.rug.nl/eldoc/dis/arts/j.h.looijenga/
> Thanks for pointing out the inconsistency in the way I was stressing the words. I wish Wright were more explicit in the evidence for the set of rules he sets forth.
Braune clears up some of the ambiguities, as well as offering more doubts in the form of alternative viewpoints, and has lots more helpful and telling examples, but still not all of the reasoning is clear. Yes, it's very frustrating, because you know these people must have had some method for deciding, and right or wrong it would be nice to know what they were thinking.
> Why does he say that the prefixes such as fra- were stressed in nouns, I wonder?
Could it be analogy with OE cognates maybe, where it would be possible to tell from the metre in poetry, and often elsewhere by sound changes that reduced unstressed vowels? And ON, where unstressed prefixes would have been lost. In the case of ga-, which was unstressed in these languages, Campbell’s OE Grammar mentions one word where the identity of the prefix was obscured allowing it to keep its initial stress, albeit as part of a diphthong: géatwe, beside the unstressed form in compounds -getawe. I wonder if there's any more direct evidence for Gothic though. Do you know whether borrowings into Spanish preserve traces of a non-Romance stress pattern? One possible example that comes to mind is the name Álvarez, which I think is from *Alawar a surname ending (originally Basque?).
> You read really fast! I had a hard time listening to the details in pronunciation because it flew by so fast.
You're right, it's not as clear as it might be. I’ll have another try sometime soon.
Peter