Getae and Dacians? Are they the same? Or is this unknowable?

[Alanus]

But if they showed up north and west of Black Sea, having mixed tongues and names, what should we think?

Well, for one thing, cultures tend to retain their old gods, even when their language changes, just like Christians still worship Iasus even though he's been Aglicized to "Jesus." Of course they had mixed tongues, but the dominent one was Gothic. Either that or Ulfilas was writing to an incredibly small minority.

Based on the same literary tradition, some learned people once believed the Danes and the Swedes came from Dacia.

Other learned people believe (to this day) that we all extended from the Garden of Eden. And that's the most popular "literary tradition" going, still a best seller.

Isn't actually Peter Heather persona non grata in this thread for questioning "Germanicity"?

No, he gets my boot in the cassabwa because he doesn't know one end of a steppe bow from the other. Of course, we're talking about "assymetrical" bows, not symetrical ones. :lol:

For Matthews, Goffart, Christensen, Curta or Halsall (to keep the list short, I could easily expand it to few dozen names) there's no belly laugh about Heather's work. Oh, perhaps they are not "serious scholars" (whatever that means, because Heather is referenced also by Wolfram) :mrgreen:

Well, so Wolfram did. But I'll take Wolfram to Heather, thank you. The "belly laughs" are his historical dissertatons on a TV channel that has not right to profess historicity.

What it boils down to, I gather, is that you believe some theories and I believe others. They're theories, sometimes claiming to be rhetoric, but they're still theories because it's a little late to ask a Goth where he came from or (most curiously) why he spoke an East Germanic language. (And Gothic is considered by linguists to be East Germanic, not something else.) 8)