CORESPONDENŢE ETIMOLOGICE ŞI IMPLICAŢII ISTORICE ALE LEXICULUI AGRAR GOTIC ATESTAT ÎN BIBLIA LUI WULFILA (SEC. IV)
ETYMOLOGICAL LINKS AND HISTORICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE GOTHIC AGRARIAN VOCABULARY RECORDED IN WULFILA’S BIBLE (4TH CENTURY)

Summary/Abstract: This author joins thepredecessors who expressed their admiration for the way in which Wulfila – as bishop of the Visigoths and astranslator of the Bible, from Greek into Gothic – was able to find the right Old Germanic terms as equivalentsfor the Greek ones. The nine illustrative examples include verses from Wulfila’s New Testament (NTW), to whichcorresponding verses from a Romanian version of the Bible (ed. 1975) were added. In keeping with the title ofthe article, only a series of NTW verses that contain Gothic agrarian terms were selected. One aim of thediscussion was to show that most of those terms have well-attested cognates in other Germanic languages.Unique Gothic attestations are represented by hoha ‘wooden plough’ (with etymological correspondents inSanskrit and Slavic) and gilþa (as designation of an archaic hook-sickle). Other Gothic words recorded in NTW,such as arjan ‘to plow’ and akrs ‘cultivated field’ have clear cognates in other Indo-European languages. Also,from the stand point of contact linguistics, hybrid-compounds such as aurtigards ‘garden’ (from Latin hortus +Gothic gards) and weinagards‘vineyard’ (borrowed into Slavic as vinograd) are remarkable. Those compounds,together with Late Latin compāniō, as loan translation of Gothic gahlaiba (a derivative of Gothic hlaifs ‘bread’,borrowed into Slavic as khleb), indicate early contacts and exchanges within the Roman-Germanic-Slavictriangle that actually stands for a fundament of today’s Europe.

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