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Luthic is an inflected fusional language, with four/five cases for nouns, pronouns (comitative forms), and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative); three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter); and three numbers (singular, dual in personal pronouns, and plural). | Luthic is an inflected fusional language, with four/five cases for nouns, pronouns (comitative forms), and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative); three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter); and three numbers (singular, dual in personal pronouns, and plural). | ||
===Etymology=== | |||
The ethnonym Luths remains one of the most debated issues in both Germanic and Romance philology. The earliest attestation appears in Greco-Roman authors of the 6th century, who mention the Lūthae (alternatively Lūthī) as one of the new barbaric peoples of Ravenna. This is usually traced back to a Gotho-Luthic lūþiks—although many scholars consider this to be a scribal error, a “correction” of *lūhtiks after influence from Latin lūthicus. | |||
In the Gotho-Luthic language, the Luths referred to themselves collectively as the *Lūþiþiuþa “Luth people”—likely a compound of an unattested *Lūþus and þiuþa, attested as genitive plural Lūþiþiuþārum. | |||
It is generally accepted that the Gothic letter ⟨𐌸⟩ (romanised as ⟨þ⟩) used in Gotho-Luthic represented a range of sounds, most likely both /θ/ and /tʰ/. Such ambiguity in transcription helps explain the divergent traditions in later manuscripts. A consensus has emerged that this orthographic uncertainty persisted until the so-called Luthic Reform (riforma lúthica), when spelling was standardised and the Gothic script itself gradually gave way to the Greek alphabet. | |||
The ethnonym Lūthus appears to derive from the Gothic liuts, meaning “hypocritical” or “dishonest,” likely reflecting the disdain the Greco-Romans felt toward the barbarian kingdom and its plebeian rulers. Among the Luths themselves, however, a folk etymology emerged. They associated the name with Latin lūx, adding the common augmentative suffix -cus/-ticus to form lūcticus. This was later misinterpreted and spirantised by Gothic scribes as *lūhtiks, giving rise to the attested forms lūþiks, lūthicus and Lūthae. This folk etymology may have emerged alongside the Roman use of the term vespertīnī to describe the barbarian peoples living west of Rome—literally “toward the setting sun.” The latter, being a relational adjective to the evening, semantically changed to mean “people of the sunset” or “sunset people,” was subsequently associated with the notion of “light,” further reinforcing the Luths’ own reinterpretation of their ethnonym. | |||
===The study of Luthic=== | ===The study of Luthic=== | ||