Talk:Gontia (deity)

Godess Guntia

I've created this page mainly because it was "requested" in the pages: Günzburg and Horse goddess. I think that User talk:Saintswithin has once written an article on the subject but it was deleted because it contained no sources. To prevent that happening to this article as well, I added the only(?) academic source available on the subject as a reference. Of course, if anyone has any objections about the notability and the verifiability of the article is welcome to make them known, but don't forget it is a notable deity (on the one hand) of an ancient and relatively poorly attested mythology (on the other hand), we're talking about.

Omnipedian (talk) 11:31, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I was one of the editors who criticised the original, deleted article. This pretty much resumes the earlier material. Just a couple of points I'd like to note:

1. Her Irish name is given - where is the connection with Ireland? (none in the article and I don't know of any work on Irish myth that mentions her).
2. Dodgy etymology. Quote: "Her name is etymologically related either to the Welsh word canda (shining, white) or the Celtic condate (confluence)." I can assure you that there is no such Welsh word - modern or Middle Welsh - as "canda". There is Latin candida of course, and Middle Welsh can/cann means "pure white", but definitely no canda. As for condate, I'm not sure about other Celtic languages, but the Brythonic ones - Welsh, Breton, Cornish - have nothing like that. Welsh for "confluence" is cymer, for instance. Condate sounds more like from Latin condo "to put together, join". Even if there were a Welsh canda and *Celtic condate, the etymological link with Góntia would seem to me to be tenuous, to say the least. If the author is so obviously wrong about a supposed Welsh "canda" just how reliable is the rest of this?

I'll leave the big question of how such a widespread goddess is so little known, but the above points certainly raise doubts about the validity of the rest of the article, which seems to have a single published source. I am sure the article is created in good faith but these are serious defects which need addressing (please don't take the criticism personally!). Enaidmawr (talk) 00:30, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) Your criticism seems well-substantiated and I have no reasons to object to it. The fact that I could not find real Academic Literature on the subject (and its "Irishness") made me think of the possibility that everything known about it is of purely anecdotological nature. I was also concerned about the poorly reasoned etymologies with which I came across but I hoped that in the meantime I would be able to find more evidence indicating that they are not just Folk etyma -- which obviously did not happen --. However, I still think that this article deserves a place in Wikipedia: Góntia was the only Low Countries' deity (I hope there are no doubts about her "Netherlandish" origins) that did not have an article so far, and right now it is perhaps the only web source of information about her that is at least falsifiable. Regarding my source sadly I do not have access to it anymore. I came across with the book a long time ago in a library and I am not even sure that it contained the information that exists in the article, thus I was based on written summaries/descriptions of people that have read it. This means that eventually someone who actually has access to it or to any other relevant sources can correct the article. Concerning the etyma, I suggest that they should be reviewed by someone who knows more on Continental Celtic and Low Germanic languages and if they still do not make any sense then be marked as folk ones or be removed (would a mere reference to the relation between Günz/Ghent and Góntia constitute original research?). Finally, I wanna stress that there are several articles related to Native American/African/Old Europe Mythologies that also rely on one or no sources and contain unverifiable/nonnotable information but yet nobody complains about them; my point is that though I absolutely agree with the guidelines of Wikipedia, I nevertheless observed that they are not universally and fairly adopted [this latter comment goes not to your observations above, but to your possible future nomination of the article for deletion :)].
Omnipedian (talk) 15:25, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Vicus Guntia

I've recently found this references' list: among the books I found a book on Gontia (probably as a place) by a writer called Jürgen Schmid, a copy of which I wasn't able to find yet, and a book on Bavarian history by a writer called Klaus Kraft, which I did find and read its prologue. There (in page 13), unless my somewhat poor knowledge of German betrays me, Gontia/Guntia appears only as the name of a 1st-5th c. CE Roman Vicus; here's another paper mentioning her/it as a Vicus. This just confirms that Guntia and Günzburg are related, at least linguistically. I guess, despite the fact that I cannot cite a dictionary, that *gont-/*gunt- was originally a continental Celtic word (-root), whose initial semantics may never be clarified, that was first adapted to Latin and then from Latin to German. However, the problem that you've posed remains: if there was ever existed a kind of ancient cult revovolving around the river or the region Guntia, why it is so hard to find a ref. mentioning it. Finally, I am obliged to say that I rechecked some of the non-scholarly / non-direct-information that I had used in the article's first version (concerning Gontia having something to do with Ireland), but it's proved to be just pseudo-historiography. Omnipedian (talk) 08:31, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much for this, Omnipedian. I hope you appreciate that, as a Welshman, I have every sympathy with you in your efforts to represent a culture that has been marginalised and neglected. As you know, my only concern was with the academic verifiablility of the claims. The information on the vicus is interesting. It does suggest (but this is only an educated guess or OR) that the place may indeed be named after a local tutelary deity, of which there are many hundreds of examples often attested by a single inscription. The presumed root *gont-/gunt- doesn't help too much, I'm afraid. Also if the name has been Latinised that creates further problems. Frankly this all sounds as if the original author has taken some antiquarian speculation as fact. I too have looked up a few possible encyclopedic sources, but with no luck. We can certainly discount Ireland, Britain, Spain and possibly Gaul (I don't have access to some highly specialist - and very expensive! - linguistic works on Gaulish language and deities, but I would not be too hopeful). Thanks again, and best wishes. (PS I should add that my German is almost certainly far poorer than yours, so it would be quite time-consuming for me to check the German sources). Enaidmawr (talk) 21:17, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for scrutinizing my edits. However, I think that there is room for even more scrutiny. I just found a Gaulish (i.e., Continental Celtic) dictionary: [1]. I don't have much time right now to write more about it, but I think that a couple of its entries could be used either as a reference for the etymological part of the article or at least as a possible subject-matter in this talk-page (condate, arganto-, canto-). --Omnipaedista (talk) 06:30, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Etymology

Never heard of this goddess myself but, assuming the name is of correct form, it's highly unlikely that it would be 'etymologically related' to (I assume this means 'cognate with') Gallic and Classical British CONDATIS (attested nominative?)~ CONDATE (attested locative?), whether by borrowing into a Germanic tongue or Grimm's law. CONDATIS is attested as a toponym and a theonym for a god uniformly identified with Mars. It seems to be formed from the morphemes *com- 'with, together' *-da- 'meet, gather' and *-ti-s, a widely attested Indo-European verbal-noun-forming verbal root suffix. So the meaning, judging by it's connations with the god Mars and toponyms for road junctions and confluences was likely something like 'a meeting together,' 'convergence' or 'collision' or perhaps all by polysemy, with obvious connotations on the field of battle and so with a god syncretised with the Roman war-god Mars. Miranda Green at the University of Wales glosses this name as 'watersmeet' [sic] in her God's of the Celts but she doesn't source the gloss, even when contacted about it by email, and personally I find this an inadequate gloss for 'water' is not strictly the only referent. I think by 'canda' you mean *cand/o- -a: the apparent proto-form of the Welsh can as in the name Morgan [from *Mori-canda?] wherein the initial voiceless velar gains voice for very precise grammatical reasons. It is unlikely however that góntia is related to any form of this Welsh word and I have not heard of any evidence to suggest that Gaulish went through similar phonological changes to Welsh before it died out. Indeed, Welsh itself does not seem to have begun even voicing intervocalic voiceless stops till after the sub-Roman period for we have names such as VORTIPORUS attested from this period, which, had it survived as a name today would have ended up somthing like *Gordibyr. This theonym, if it is real, looks to me like a purely Germanic one and, by Grimm's law, would be descended from a Proto-Indo-European *ghundi- / *ghondi- / *gwhondi-. There was apparently an Indo-European root *gwhen-' 'slay' but I can't explain the *-di in PIE from which the -ti- of Gontia would have to be descended GeoffMGleadall (talk) 21:00, 27 November 2009 (UTC).

Accented form

The Dutch version of the article gives an accented version of the name (Góntia) and a synonym (Candida). I was not able to find such synonyms in academic sources. --Omnipaedista (talk) 08:10, 11 December 2014 (UTC)