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

[Alanus]

Hello Rumo,

Quite the dissertation, and a good show. For brevity (and space) I'll not list any quotes from above but get right to the meat.

Most true, Jordanes added whatever he thought pertinent on top of the work of Cassiodorus. But we must look at his views in context to his own time. One of the amazing features of his work is the incorportation of the Scandzia tale. If we look at the legenday roots of the Romans, the Gauls, and the Britons, we discover the Trojan tie. Then why did Jordanes/Cassiodorus choose a rinky-dink mythical isle in the middle of no-where, with its dubious peoples and pine-studded shores? It doesn't ring very heroic at all. More like a heritage of cow-paths and bee-hives. Perhaps Heather and Halsell had their own agendas in confuting the old wives' tales, but it doesn't make them "righter." It only makes them "innovative." Please, Rumo, take a hard look at their motives. And quite frankly, to find Gothic origins in Britain is incredibly innovative.

Now, I'm an old fart. And I believe the traditions. They do hold water in a fashion. Take for instance the old theory of a Indo-European "homeland" somewhere below the Don and the Urals. Could various cultural groups actually spread out, east and west, and retain a common language and heritage. Perhaps they did. The Alans named themselves after someone they considered their "progenitor," basically the "first good and great man." Fine. That's a great old wives' tale. Then we discover in the old British Brut, that the "first man in Europe" was named Alanus. (Which places me in the tale through an accident of birth.) But how could two disparate societies come up with a progenitor with the same exact name? That is the power of "cultural memory," as I call it. It's the frisky play of those old Singers of Songs. In the same fashion, the Goths retained their knowledge of their homeland. Yes, it can be disputed by newer historians looking for a better niche, an nice fat Doctorate in History, but it cannot be confuted, only in theory. And that's what "new history" is. Theory.

Now to language and the "three generation principal." You say the "axiom just doesn't work for the known history." Please show me more than one refutiation. Bishop Ulfilas is the perfect example. He descended, third generation, from a Cappadocian core group within the Goths. Yet his name is Gothic, and he wrote his bible in the same language. (And this, in my estimation, was a far bigger accomplishment than anything done by the Roman emperors or historians of his time.) So does it not work? Want a close-up personal evaluation of how the process continues? Then look at me. My grandparents were born in Italy and Scotland, my mother was a first generation American, and I'm the second. I cannot speak a word of Gaelic or Italian, only English, the one language used by the dominent culture that all my grandparents' squeezed into. It was the same with Ulfilas and millions of people absorbed into some greater culture, no matter what culture it was.