Magnús Snædal

The present paper deals with Attila, the name of the famous king of the Huns. For a long while it has been considered Gothic, meaning ‘little father’. This paper will cast doubt upon this explanation and will suggest a Hunnic origin of Attila with the content ‘horseman’.

The present paper discusses the etymology of three Gothic nouns: banja* ‘sore’, winja ‘pasture’, and sunja ‘truth’. Each of them has a cognate in Old Norse: ben ‘fatal wound’, vin ‘oasis’ and syn ‘refusal’. None of the West-Germanic languages preserves all three nouns. All are short, feminine jō-stems with an -n- in front of the stem suffix. The main issue discussed here is the etymology and formation of these nouns.

The Greek word τράχηλος ‘neck’ is, in the Gothic Bible translation, once translated with hals and once with balsagga*. The paper deals with the question of the latter form: Can it make sense if taken as it is or is it a scribal error for intended *halsagga.
 

This paper is an attempt to account for the number and frequency of individual characters in the Gothic corpus. The first section explains the foundation of this statistical study, i.e. the text used and the number of characters in the main text of individual Gothic documents. The second section contains a more detailed study of all the characters in the Gothic manuscripts, and in a subsection an attempt is made to extend this study to phonemes (or principal speech sounds). The third section treats the numerals and the fourth concludes. All numbers occurring in the Gothic corpus are listed in the Appendix.

The paper deals with the orthographic cluster ‹ggw› in Gothic and the question if it denoted both /ngw/ and /ggw/ or only the former. The paper concludes that internal evidence only points to /ngw/ and that external evidence cannot be used to support double pronunciation of the cluster.