Fun with Accents!

[lwood]

[x-post: allfathers_own]

Among my several hats, I'm the Assistant Editor of the Troth's quarterly magazine, Idunna. As part of this job, I'm going through our back issues and converting them to PDF's that can be sold for print and/or download at lulu. Most are already done, but some need extra attention.

One of the issues that's needed extra attention is issue 41, whose theme is Odin, so of course it's got to be difficult. In one of the articles, the author begins by listing Odin's primary name in several Germanic languages. This is great--and with all the circumflexes, macrons, and other diacriticals in place--this is wonderful.

He did it in a non-standard font which he didn't share, meaning this was mangled in transit and was mangled in print. It might have been the Old English Font Pack, which was relatively new back then, but I would rather not have to download them to find out (old fonts can wreak havoc in new machines). In the intervening decade, technology has caught up and surpassed the need to make up a special font just so you can have your o-macron (ō) and your u-circumflex (û)--now is the time to fix this for real. This art, as a whole, isn't new to me (I will spare you the rant), but this is a new wrinkle, so I'm a bit at sea.

While I know how to spell Odin in Modern English, Old Norse, Modern German, usw, and I can make a reasonable guess at Old High German, I've got nuthin' on Gothic and Frisian.

Here's what I have--what's the "right" way, given that the usual caveats about standardized spellings apply?

Woden (NE) (New English?)
WÛden (Anglo-Saxon) (I know this is wrong from the case of the first vowel; should it be Wōden? A-S has a love of macrons.) -- [Edit: solved by dr_beowulf, it is, in fact, Wōden (missing vowel: o-macron) ]
Óðinn (Old Norse) (fixed that myself)
Wuodan (Old High German)--should this be Wûodan? Ûuodan? OHG is fond of circumflexes.
*VÙdans (Gothic)--not only wrong, but reconstructed, fun!
WÍda (Frisian)--again, at least the case is wrong, likely the vowel also

Oh, and, lastly, a completely missing mystery vowel. Its context:

The word oski and its Anglo-Saxon cognate w˙sc are related to words dealing with desire and the will.

Oski in ON is "The Wished-For", "The Desired One", usw--the A-S cognate would probably fall somewhere near this (duh?). [Edit: Solved courtesy of dr_beowulf, it's wūsc. Missing vowel: u-macron.]

It might be safest to write answers like this:

Oh, that OHG one is Wûodan--right letters, but that first "u" has a circumflex. You know, that pointy-hat-thing.

Thanks in advance for any stabs in the dark more educated than mine, although if you're gonna stab in the dark, watch where you're pointing that spear...

-- Lorrie

PS: If you, Gentle Reader, have purchased one of the PDF's of some other issue and find it has damned annoying layout problems, kindly inform me--I will fix, re-release, and yes, give you a fresh, less-broken PDF once that's done.

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Did you find this? Not a primary source (it has links to some references) but it has at least AS, Gothic, OHG and OLG versions.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Heh--that's a list of by-names, which is, alas, exactly what I don't want. The thing I'm pecking at is "the proper noun, which in Modern English when Anglicized from the Old Norse is spelled 'Odin', as translated into these other, even-more-obscure, dead Germanic languages".

As you can see...not simple.

-- Lorrie is about to invent some new by-names, but they won't be pretty...

[lwood.livejournal.com]

*keeps reading*

Mnh. I see that there's some others on there (and I expect allfathers_own to repeat this citation, for which I do thank you), but my real hope is that someone who actually does that flavor of heathenry will hop out of the tall grass and say, "I'm an amateur at Gothic, but we use _________."

Or maybe even the original author; it's not like he's dead or anything, just a bit detached at present.

-- Lorrie

[dr-beowulf.livejournal.com]

I thought Oski was the name of the Cal mascot. . . [wow, I'll bet you've NEVER heard that one, being an Odin-person in the Bay Area and all].

Seriously, oski is cognate with Anglo-Saxon wusc (and Modern English wish), which does indeed have a macron over the u.

Anglo-Saxon is Woden with a macron over the o.

I have vague haunting memories that that Frisian form is something like Weda. (I've never heard of that form being preserved in a text, and it might be a modern reconstruction -- I'll ask.) The rest I don't know off the top of my head, but will look up as I have time.

--
Ben

[lwood.livejournal.com]

I thought Oski was the name of the Cal mascot. . . [wow, I'll bet you've NEVER heard that one, being an Odin-person in the Bay Area and all].

And given how many by-names on the list are kennings for "bear", owing to the whole berserker thing, yep, that's multiply amusing. *grin*

dpaxson and I only hear it when we're making jokes to each other. 8-P

The vowels with macrons have been dropped into the text, yay!

As for the Frisian form--whatever the vowel is in "W?da", it's got a squiggle on, or it would have rendered properly.

-- Lorrie

[dr-beowulf.livejournal.com]

The Gothic reconstruction starting with a V is a real blunder: Gothic didn't have a letter V.

The known Gothic word "woths" means "mad, possessed", and it is written with a macron over the o and a thorn in place of the "th".

The ending "-ans" (from PIE "-on-os") means something like "master of"; compare Gothic "thiuda", "people; tribe; folk" with "thiudans", "king". (Same for Old English "theod" and "theoden" -- yes, Rohan was led by "King King".) Odin/Woden/*Wodanaz's name basically means "master of wod", and uses that suffix. . .

So the best Gothic reconstruction I can come up with would be "Wothans" -- with a macron over the o, and a thorn in place of the th. I guess "Wodans" might also work, again with a macron over the o. But lose that damned V.

A general note on accents, macrons, etc. -- in the actual manuscripts, those are often not marked, or at best they're marked inconsistently. Where you see them, they've usually been inserted by modern editors and linguists. And not every editor includes them -- Krapp and Dobie's edition of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records strips them out even in cases where the scribe did put them in. In other words: I'm glad you're this scrupulously accurate, but if you were to accidentally leave out one of these accents, macrons, circumflexes, ecksetra, it would not necessarily be a Cardinal Sin Against The Lore.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Hwæt!

What I've got now, and will roll with, is:

Woden (New English)/Wōden (Anglo-Saxon)/Óðinn (Old Norse)/Uuodan (Old High G)erman/*Wōþans (Gothic)/Wêda (Frisian)

Woden (NE)/W(o-macron)den (AS)/(O-acute)(eth)inn (ON)/Uuodan (OHG)/*W(o-macron)(thorn)ans (Go)/W(e-circ)da (Fris.)

'cos I think the original Merseburg manuscript should trump Grimm.

Also, dpaxson says that if you're enough of a badass to be calling the Grimms on their business, you should be made Loremaster by Fiat.

Except, you know, for never being able to live down That One Time, at Trothmoot...

-- Lorrie

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Also: you wholly and completely rock my socks, and thank you very much.

(I mean, you're helping me help you, but you know what I mean)

-- Lorrie

[dr-beowulf.livejournal.com]

OK, I just checked Grimm's _Teutonic Mythology_, chapter VII, p. 131. . . Grimm is the one who says that Odin "would in the Gothic dialect have been called Vodans" with a circumflex over the o. I see where Swain got this form now, but I still don't think this is now considered correct -- I mean, Grimm was writing 160-odd years ago. Anyway, that's Swain's source.

The Gothic dictionary I consulted, by the way, gave "woths" with a thorn as the word for "mad; possessed". Ulfilas's translation of the Bible, however, which is the only Gothic text of any size that we have, seems to use "wods". So I guess either "Wodans" or "Wothans" could be supported as the reconstructed name of Odin in Gothic. Just put a macron over the o.

Grimm also reconstructs the Frisian form as "Weda" with a circumflex over the e. But I checked a later Old Frisian dictionary, and it uses a macron for long vowels. But modern West Frisian seems to prefer the circumflex. The circumflex and the macron mean the same thing, and as I said earlier, these signs were added by later linguists; the original texts usually don't show them. So I don't think it matters that much whether you write "Weda" with a circumflex or a macron over the e.

[dr-beowulf.livejournal.com]

The actual manuscript of the Merseburg Charms spells the god's name "uuodan" -- that AFAIK is the only instance of his name actually appearing in OHG. I've seen some authors use the original "double U" -- Uuodan or UUodan -- and others turn the double U into a doubleyou -- Wodan. Grimm (ch. 7, vol. 1, Teutonic Mythology) gives it as "Wuodan" -- no circumflexes or nothin'. Since Grimm seems to be Swain's source, you might as well use that.

The problem here is that there is no standard Old High German spelling; there were always a whole bunch of dialects. OK, this is true for other languages as well, such as Old English -- but for several historical reasons, most of what there is to read in Old English is written in the West Saxon dialect, which is more or less the literary standard. OHG, on the other hand, as far as I can tell is just all over the bleedin' map; every monastic scriptorium had different spelling conventions.

[narfi.livejournal.com]

What about Proto-Germanic?

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Oh, one doesn't edit KveldúlfR for very long, particularly when slogging through the mumblety-foo pages of Our Troth, without knowing all about *Wodanaz (or sometimes *Woðanaz) -- but the author of this article didn't put it in, so I don't have to worry about it.

-- Lorrie