07-05-2005, 02:25 PM
Professor Kortlandt has some other articles on his site ( http://www.kortlandt.nl/editions/ and http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/ ), but no "Gothic stuff" online alas.
One possible source of info is probably the Journal of Indo-European Studies, any decent university library must have a subscription...
Then there's our resident Nordic expert, Tim O'Neill / Thiudareiks, he's probably the one most qualified on this Board concerning ancient Germanic languages.
As for the Jats, thanks, but the supposed link between Jats and Goths is a very old idea that was dumped on the rubbish heap of history well over 100 years ago, if not much earlier. One of the first (maybe the first) to suggest a link between the Jats (a Northwestern Indian caste) and the Goths was Colonel James Todd in his "Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan", based on a superficial similarity in the name and certain similarities in the religion, mythology and customs of northern India and western Eurasia (Europe and the Middle East). Todd thought that the Goths had been some "super-people" ranging from northern Europe to central Asia from which many other peoples had sprung, including the European Goths and the North Indian Jats. He wasn't entirely wrong, some of his ideas clearly foreshadow later ideas concerning the Indo-Europeans and the Indo-Iranians. However, most of Todd's ideas are now quaint at best and discredited early 19th century (pseudo-) scholarship at worst (though his books are still a great source for the northwestern India of his own lifetime). Unfortunately, as with more ideas long discarded in modern western scholarship, they cling on elsewhere, usually in the service of one nationalism or another...
That doesn't mean there weren't any Iranian elements in the "Gothic" people - there was spatial and temporal overlap with presumably Iranian-speaking tribes, so there must have been a degree of mutual influencing and intermingling going on - but I'm extremely wary of sites and forums like this Jat one.
One possible source of info is probably the Journal of Indo-European Studies, any decent university library must have a subscription...
Then there's our resident Nordic expert, Tim O'Neill / Thiudareiks, he's probably the one most qualified on this Board concerning ancient Germanic languages.
As for the Jats, thanks, but the supposed link between Jats and Goths is a very old idea that was dumped on the rubbish heap of history well over 100 years ago, if not much earlier. One of the first (maybe the first) to suggest a link between the Jats (a Northwestern Indian caste) and the Goths was Colonel James Todd in his "Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan", based on a superficial similarity in the name and certain similarities in the religion, mythology and customs of northern India and western Eurasia (Europe and the Middle East). Todd thought that the Goths had been some "super-people" ranging from northern Europe to central Asia from which many other peoples had sprung, including the European Goths and the North Indian Jats. He wasn't entirely wrong, some of his ideas clearly foreshadow later ideas concerning the Indo-Europeans and the Indo-Iranians. However, most of Todd's ideas are now quaint at best and discredited early 19th century (pseudo-) scholarship at worst (though his books are still a great source for the northwestern India of his own lifetime). Unfortunately, as with more ideas long discarded in modern western scholarship, they cling on elsewhere, usually in the service of one nationalism or another...
That doesn't mean there weren't any Iranian elements in the "Gothic" people - there was spatial and temporal overlap with presumably Iranian-speaking tribes, so there must have been a degree of mutual influencing and intermingling going on - but I'm extremely wary of sites and forums like this Jat one.
Andreas Baede
