Clues to the Chronology of Old Germanic Loans in Romanian and in Other South-East European Languages

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and Scientific Research of Romania. Competing interests: no competing interests have been declared. Publisher: Institute of Slavic Studies PAS. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 PL License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/), which permits redistribution, commercial and non­ ­commercial, provided that the article is properly cited. © The Author(s) 2015. Adrian Poruciuc

1 I am inclined to use inverted commas in the case of "East Germanic" since that formula appears to be geographic rather than glottogenetic.Specialists in Old Germanic have not yet clarified the mixture of Suebic (ElbeGermanic) and Scandinavian that is apparent in both Wulfila's Gothic and the socalled "Crimean Gothic".Not to speak of the long discussion on In regard to the Old Germanic populations which, at various times, were militarily and sociopolitically active in Southeast Europe, there is more than sufficient mainstream knowledge, much of which I took into consideration in my previous articles (see list of references).Here I will include only a brief list of archaeologicalhistorical facts, finds and events that are relevant for this discussion.2-3rd-2nd centuries BC: West Germanic tribes of a Suebic type (Elbgermanen) moved into what is now Southern Poland, Western Ukraine, Eastern Romania and the Republic of Moldova; the presence of those Germanic people is indicated by finds in the areas of archaeological cultures (appar ently multiethnic) such as Przeworsk (mainly in Poland) and Poieneşti Lukaševka (in eastern Romania and the Republic of Moldova); historically, representatives of those Old Germanic populations were mentioned under names such as Bastarni (Bastarnae, Basternae), Peucini and Skiri.-2nd century BC: The Bastarni attacked the polities of the Getians, Thra cians and Dardanians.-27 BC: Romans troops led by Crassus attacked territories controlled by the Bastarni north of the Lower Danube.-About 109: Germanic warriors were represented on the Tropaeum Traiani (today's Adamclisi, southeastern Romania); those warriors appear to have been allies or mercenaries of the Dacians in the RomanDacian war of 101-102.-161-180: A long war was waged by Emperor Marcus Aurelius against the Marcomanni and other Germanic tribes that had kept Roman provinces of CentralEast Europe under threat.-2nd-3rd centuries: Goths, Gepids and other tribal units spread over the area of what was to be archaeologically known as the Sântana de MureşCernjakhov Culture.-238-268: Repeated Gothic incursions into the Balkans and Asia Minor.whatever branch of Old Germanic was represented by the languages spoken by the Vandals, the Burgundians and the Langobards, respectively.
-271: Aurelian's victory over the Goths was followed by the strategic with drawal of Roman legions and administration from Dacia Antiqua.-280: Most of the Bastarni were settled in Thrace: the rest of them followed in 295.-602: Emperor Mauritius was overthrown by Phocas, whose tyrannical rule marked the last phase in the history of the Eastern Roman Empire; during that period "a flood of Slavs and Avars spread over the Balkans" (Ostrogorsky, 1969, p. 85).
The selected dates and data above cover almost nine centuries marked by various types of contact (and exchange) between Germanics and nonGermanics of southeast Europe.3Such lists -however wellordered their chronology may appear -are too lapidary, and most of them refer to violent events (wars, inva sions, rebellions, displacements and migrations), rather than to cases of symbiosis, bilingualism and assimilation, all made possible by coterritoriality.4 Traditionally, the migration of the Langobards to Italy is considered to have marked the end of the spectacular Völkerwanderungen of Old Germanic tribal unions.Less spectacular, but ethnogenetically more significant, were the Old Germanic communities that decided to stay put and not to participate in "final" migrations.5Such speakers of Old Germanic Rest-und Trümmersprachen (cf.Beck, 1989) appear to have lingered "insularly" in southeast Europe and to have preserved their identity for longer or shorter times, before being assimilated by more numerous populations.6Here are only a few examples of proved persistence: (a) Archaeological finds prove that Gepidic communities still existed in the area of the former kingdom of the Gepids several centuries after the destruction of that polity (cf.Kiss, 1987).As for post567 events, according to Ostrogorsky (1969, p. 102), in the year 626 "the Avar Khan and his hordes of Avars, Slavs, Bulgars and Gepids appeared before Constantinople and besieged the city by land and sea."(b) In 715, the "Gothogreeks" (that is, Hellenized Ostrogoths) in the Byzantine province of Opsikion are known to have been participants in the events that led to the enthronement of Theodosius III (cf.Ostrogorsky, 1969, pp. 154-155).
3 I counted nine centuries, from 3 rd BC to 6 th AD, whereas other authors took into con sideration a shorter period.For instance, in István Bóna's opinion (as quoted in Curta, 2001, p. 204, footnote 29), the year 568 marked the end of the 'almost 600 years' rule by successive Germanic tribes in the Carpathian basin." 4 In presenting the important amount of Slavic loans is Romanian as resulting from "the coexistence of the Roman and Sl[avic] speaking population for several centuries", Shevelov makes the following statement (1964, p. 160): "This was a typical case of coterritorial languages, not just contiguous."Although the effects are not as spectacular as the ones of the RomanSlavic contact (as viewed by Shevelov), we should interpret Old Gemanisms preserved in Romanian and in other languages of EastSoutheastCentral Europe also as resulting from situations of "coterritorial languages".
5 I refer to the historically well attested migrations such as the ones that eventually led to the total assimilation of the Goths in Spain, the Vandals in North Africa and the Langobards in Italy.
(c) Paulus Diaconus (Historia Langobardorum, I, 27) mentioned that, in his own time (around 790), there were Gepids still living in their old Middle Danube homeland, "under the harsh rule of the Huns" (that is, of the Avars).
(d) Gothic was still used as a church language in Tomis (today's Constanţa, Romania) in the 9 th century, as mentioned by a contemporary Frankish monk, Walafrid Strabo (cf. Bennett, 1980, p. 19).7 In the paragraphs below I will present and discuss more concrete textual references to the earliest Germanic moves within Southeast Europe.I will begin by mentioning what was most probably the earliest written attestation of a Ger manic group in southeast Europe.The text I refer to was presented (in 2012) by Alexandru Avram as a "decree" inscribed in stone by latethirdcentury BC inhabitants of the Greek colony of Histria, on the BlackSea coast of today's Romania.The inscription (dated to the period between 220 and 200 BC) mentions a group of mounted archers hired by the notables of Histria.The mercenaries, whose leader was one Ates, belonged to the tribe of the Skiri, as we can see in the following fragment of the epigraphic document under discussion: It so happens that among the earliest attested Germanics, the Skiri8 were the ones whose ethnic name is quite transparently Germanic, since it can be referred to words such as Gothic skeirs 'clear' (cf.Köbler, 1989, s.v. skeirs) and English sheer (< Old English scīr) 'bright, fine, unmixed'(cf.Hoad, 1993, s.v. sheer).Specialists drew the conclusion that the ethnonym Skiri (probably a selfdesignation that meant "Pure Ones") indicated Germanics of unmixed race, unlike the Bastarni (see below).9 Several decades after the Histrian inscription, Polybios -a cultured Greek who had many things to engage him in Rome -heard about an attack of the Bastarni (instigated by the Macedonians) against the Dardanians, as related in the following fragment (my translation after the Piatkovski edition of Polybios, XXVI, 9): At the same time [as the delegation from Rhodes, in 177 BC], there arrived in Rome the Dardanians who wanted to signal to the Senate the appearance of the Bastarnae, whose number, force and warlike potential worried them profoundly; the Dardanians also informed the Senate of the alliance concluded by [King] Perseus with the Galatians.
It is not clear whether Polybios -like other Greeks and Romans of his time -wrongly considered the Bastarni to be Galatians (that is, Celts), or whether he simply referred to another strategic alliance concluded by the Macedonian king in the same period.Anyway, Polybios's report clearly indicates that the Bastarni had already become a considerable militarypolitical factor, which already threatened the area of Roman interest.
It was also in the second century BC that Bastarnic incursions disturbed not only the Dardanians, but also the Thracians south of the Danube as well as the Dacians and Getians north of the same river.One aspect of that conflicti situation is mentioned by Trogus Pompeius (as quoted in Murgescu, 2001, p. 37 -my translation): The Dacians are also a branch of the Getae […].During the reign of Oroles they fought without success against the Bastarnae; therefore, as punishment […], they were forced, at the king's command, to sleep with their heads in the place of their feet and to do to their wives services which the latter would usually do to their husbands.The punishment was removed only when, by their bravery, they wiped out the shame which they had brought upon themselves in the aforesaid war.
Old Germanic issues of the West were first discussed by Caesar, who -espe cially in his De bello Gallico, I, 2 (cf.Caesar, 1960) -described the way of life and the warlike potential of firstcenturyBC Suebi; according to Caesar, the Suebi of his time were dominant among the Germani.As for facts about southeastern Europe in the Kaiserzeit, it was Tacitus who, towards the end of the first century, first presented the Peucini (who lived in the area of the Danube Delta) and the Bastarnae of the CarpathianDanubian area as being "like Germans".Never theless, the Old Germanics known under the two above mentioned names were not at all "pure" and "unmixed", as we can see in the following fragment from chapter 46 of Tacitus's De origine et situ Germanorum (generally known now as Germania -cf.Tacitus, 1960): The Peucini […], who are sometimes called the Bastarnae, in language, social habits, mode of settlement and dwelling are like Germans [sermone, cultu, sede ac domiciliis ut Germani agunt].They are a squalid and slovenly people; the features of their nobles get something of the Sarmatian ugliness from intermarriage [conubiis mixtis].
It was not only "ugliness", but also skill in horsemanship that "East Germanics" -from the Skiri of Histria to the Vandals and the Goths of later times -must have acquired by their close contacts with Sarmatians and other Skythoid populations of the steppes.
Since the earliest Germanics who moved southeast -from the Elbe to the Black Sea -can be said to have been of a Suebic type, certain pieces of infor mation provided by Caesar and Tacitus about the Suebi of their own times, are worthy of consideration.Here is, for example, a fragment from Tacitus's Germania, 38: We must come now to speak of the Suebi, who do not […] constitute a single nation [non una gens].They actually occupy more than half Germany, and are divided into a number of distinct tribes under distinct names, though all generically are called Suebi.It is the special characteristic of this nation to comb the hair sideways and fasten it below with a knot [insigne gentis obliquare crinem nodoque substringere].This distinguishes the Suebi from the rest of the Germans; this, among the Suebi, distinguishes the freeman from the slave.
In this case the Roman historian's observations perfectly correspond to plastic representations.For instance, in Ramage and Ramage (2001, p. 199) there is a description of the Germanics who were represented on a monument still standing in southeastern Romania: One of these [rectangular reliefs of Tropaeum Traiani] […] shows a Roman soldier with armor, helmet, shield and sword, attacking two bearded Dacians who wear baggy trousers.The seated man must be a German mercenary soldier, as we can tell by the knot of hair tied at the side of his head.
A more precise interpretation of the same relief -with reference to another famous monument (Trajan's Column in Rome), and to a very early attestation of Old Germanic selfconsciousness -is to be found in the Reallexikon (Hoops et al., 1976, p. 89, s.I will not delve further into the Old Germanics of imperial Roman times since the historic deeds of Goths, Gepids, Vandals and Langobards are much better known, due to the abundant firsthand information we can find in the works of several important historians, the most notable being Ammianus Marcellinus and Procopius (see Ammianus Marcellinus, 1862 for the former; Procopius, 1916 andProcopius, 1972 for the latter).I will, however, give at least some sentences from Procopius's Secret History (18, 15-21), since they reflect the sixthcentury vision of the most active Germanic tribal units of that time (my translation, after Procopius, 1972, p. 149): Before this war [against the Goths in Italy], the rule of the Goths stretched from the lands of the Gauls to the borders of Dacia, where the city of Sirmium lies.When the Roman army arrived in Italy, the Galliae and a part of the country of the Veneti were occupied by the Germanoi [=Franks], while Sirmium and the lands around it by the Gēpaides [=Gepids]; but all those lands were totally devoid of inhabitants […]: some were destroyed by the war, others by sickness and famine […].After Justin ian's ascent to the throne, the Hounoi [=Avars], the Sklavenoi and the Antai would almost yearly attack the Illyrians and the whole of Thrace, from the Ionian Sea up to the borders of Byzantium… From a Romanian perspective, situations and events of the 5th-8th centuries appear to be most significant, since it was the period during which the Vulgar Latin of Southeast Europe gradually became Romanian, and also since towards the end of the same period Romanian began to assimilate Slavic loans.Those loans certainly included a number of Old Germanic terms that had been bor rowed earlier into "Common Slavic".10I also have sufficient reasons to pay special attention to contacts and situ ations that preceded the formation of Romanian identity by many centuries.Since I observe a principle that I usually formulate as "languages die -words 10 For instance, the Romanian term scutar 'shepherd in charge of a sheepfold' (from which Scutaru derived, as a common Romanian family name) is best explained as based on Old Slavic skotъ 'cattle', which appears to be a borrowing from Gothic (according to Mańczak, as quoted in Birnbaum and Merrill, 1985, p. 59), or from some other Old Germanic language.Whereas Gothic had skatts 'money', Old Frisian had a semantically more archaic schat, which could mean either 'cattle' or 'money' -cf.Pfeifer et al. (2004), s.v.Schatz.Of the Slavic words of OGmc origin that were borrowed into early Romanian, worth mentioning are cneaz, a dumi, gomon, ploscă, viteaz and others.
survive", I assume that Old Germanic loans in Southeast European languages can reflect not only direct contact, but also transmission through intermedi aries.More concretely, one can hardly imagine any direct contact between speakers of "Skirian" and speakers of Romanian proper.But one can imagine borrowings from the languages spoken by Old Germanics such as the Skiri and the Bastarni into the local languages that were to represent the substratum of Romanian and of other languages spoken in Southeast Europe in lateancient and medieval times.Also, one can discover that a number of Old Germanic terms borrowed into Late Vulgar Latin were perpetuated in both West and East Romance (see, for instance, tubrucus 'bootleg' and tufa 'plume, tuft', discussed in Gamillscheg, 1935, pp. 257-258).
PreGothic Germanics of southeast Europe are worthy of study, also because their possible contributions (however indirect) to the stock of Old Germanic lexical matter preserved in nonGermanic languages of the areas under discussion have been generally neglected.From Diculescu (1922) to Rosetti (1986)11 andMihăescu (1993),12 the focus of the scholars who had things to say about Old Germanic loans was rather exclusively on Goths and Gepids.It was Gamillscheg who added the language of the Langobards as a possible source of Old Germanic loans in Romanian (1935, pp. 260-263).
I will not give, again, etymological details for all of them here.What I can say, briefly, is that many of the words above, by their forms and meanings, appear to reflect one or another of the historical turns and stages presented 13 The words on the list show respectable age (on Romanian soil) not only on account of their forms and meanings, but also on account of the fact that most of them produced whole series of proper names in Romanian, an aspect which I cannot discuss within the limits of this article.
14 The fact is that an important number of the Romanian words given on the list above (for instance, ban, budă, bundă, fară, gard, gata, holm, plug, rând, sprinţar, tufă and tureac) do have clear correspondents in one or several of the neighboring languages; and in many such cases it is difficult to establish how and when those words (of ultimately Germanic origins) entered the languages under discussion.
in the historical list in this article.In regard to the words in the list above, one simple thing to observe is whether or not their shapes indicate very old age on Romanian soil.For instance, just as in inherited Latin words, such as Rmn blând, lână and scândură, in Old Germanisms of Romanian, such as hânsă, râncă and scrânciob (cf.Goth hansa, OHGerm ranca and scranc, respectively) a preRomanian án changed into әn (and subsequently into in, now written în or ân).In Ivănescu's Istoria limbii române (1980, p. 202) án > әn appears as first on the list of phonetic changes that marked the earliest stage of Romanian.As for chronology proper, it is quite obvious that the change under discussion functioned in a period that preceded the assimilation of early Slavic loans (ca.seventheighth centuries), since Rmn hrană and rană show no sign of it.
Not only the form, but also the meanings of Rmn tală are significant for this discussion, especially since the shift from 'talk' to 'uproar' and 'noisy crowd' appears to reflect the very perception of Germanics by nonGermanics.15I take into consideration that Old Germanic loans that refer to Streit und Lärm appear to be linked to the very essence of the Romania-Germania contact: "Die Wörter spiegeln das normale Verhältnis zwischen Romanen und Germanen innerhalb des Imperiums wieder."I must observe, however, that similar semantic shifts could occur outside the Empire too.An illustrative case in that respect is Rus sian gόmon 'uproar' (corresponding to Czech homon and Polish gomon 'quar rel, uproar'), from which the Russsian verb gomonit' 'to shout, to make noise' derived.As indicated by Vasmer (Фасмер, 1986, s.v. гомон), most specialists considered that gomon reflects an "old borrowing from Germanic" and that it should be referred to Old Icelandic gaman and to English game (cf.Old Norse gaman 'freude, spass, wollust', as given in de Vries, 1961, and Old English gamen 'game, pleasure, mirth, sport, pastime', as an entry of Bosworth, 1983).True enough, the phonetic shift a > o is a feature that indicates the old age of gomon on Slavic soil, and its meanings (with a "semantic degradation" though) can be said to have developed from the original meanings of Germanic words such as the ones given by Vasmer.However, the existence of an obsoletedialectal Romanian noun gomόn, meaning both 'quarrel' and 'gathering, assembly' may change the perspective a little, especially since Romanian also has a verbal derivative, a gomoni, which does not mean 'to make noise', but 'to deliberate, to confer, to take counsel with, to put heads together' (cf.Ciorănescu, 2001, s.v. gomon).No doubt, the vowels of Rmn gomon and a gomoni indicate bor rowing from Slavic, but the meanings of the Romanian verb suggest a correc tion of the etymological interpretation of Slavic gomon itself.Namely, rather than assuming Old Germanic sourcewords such as Old Norse gaman, which referred to merriment and entertainment, we should see Slavic gomon rather as based on Gothic gaman (that is, on a Gothic prefixed derivative ga-man), which meant, on the one hand, 'Mitmensch, Teilnehmer, Genosse', on the other hand 'Gemeinschaft, Genossenschaft' (as presented in Köbler, 1989, s.v. gaman).It appears that when the early Romanians received the Slavic word from which Rmn a gomoni derived, the Slavs still used that word with "positive" meanings, which recall the ones of Gothic gaman.If the Germanic loan gomon suffered "semantic degradation", it was most probably due to the fact that, as Tacitus observed as early as the first century, Germanic gatherings did produce a lot of noise,16 which may have annoyed nonGermanic ears.
Although I have made use of quite limited illustrative material, I consider that the examples above do reflect enough of the complexity of Germanic SlavicRomance contacts, which in practice marked the passage from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.Certainly, phonetic changes and semantic shifts cannot indicate precise moments of history; but they can be referred to periods and to chronological stratifications.I firmly believe that research on Old Germanic loans from an interdisciplinary perspective (historyarchaeologylinguistics) can yield results of much interest for fields such as Romanic, Slavic and Ger manic studies in general, as well as for Balkan or SoutheastEuropean studies in particular.Ammianus Marcellinus. (1862).The Roman history of Ammianus Marcellinus. (C. D. Yonge, Trans.).London: Henry G. Bohn.Avram, A. (2012).Decretul SEG 52, 724.Presentation and handout at the Symposium Poleis din Pont şi Propontida în epocile elenistică şi romană, Institutul de Arheologie "Vasile Pârvan", Academia Română, Bucureşti.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
16 "If a proposal displeases them, the people roar out in dissent; if they approve, they clash their spears."(Tacitus,Germania,11) -332: An important number of Visigoths became federates of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great.-341: Wulfila (Ulfilas) was consecrated bishop of the Christians living in territories controlled by the Visigoths north of the Danube.-348: Due to persecutions by heathen Visigoths, numerous Christians, led by Wulfila, migrated from the north of the Danube into the Empire; other Christian refugees followed the same way in the period 369-372.-375-376: The Huns destroyed the polity of the Ostrogoths north of the Black Sea.-378: Emperor Valens was killed by rebellious Visigoths at Adrianople.-391-401: Visigoths led by Alaric I plundered eastern Roman provinces (some "Bastarni" were also mentioned among Alaric's allies).-418: The Gepids of the PannonianCarpathian area were subdued by the Huns.-454: Final defeat of the Huns by a Germanic alliance, the main leader of it being Ardaric, the king of the Gepids; subsequently, the Ostrogoths known as Valameriaci settled in Pannonia.-474: King Theoderic of the Ostrogoths came to rule Macedonia.-488: Theoderic (the Great) moved his people to Italy and established his capital at Ravenna.-567: The Gepidic kingdom (also covering territories of former Dacia Anti qua) was destroyed by the Avars and the Langobards.-568: The Langobards moved to Italy.