Talk:Ēostre

Brilliance

Brilliant! --Yak 13:45, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Article is fake

This article as it currently is reads like neopagan propaganda, full of stuff with no actual connection to Eostre (who is known solely from Bede, writing in Latin, so the macrons are fake), based on "sounds like." It's been faked, essentially. Can someone purge all the crap please? The Matronae Austriahennae - a triad of mother goddesses - does not mention Eostre, and obviously one goddess is not three. It's right to report scholarly speculation. It's not right to present it as fact. Demonteddybear100 (talk) 21:21, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Cam you humor me and cite some specific passages you think shouldn't been in the article. Saying the article's been faked is pretty inane--there's multiple citations to reliable sources in most paragraphs. Remsense 00:46, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Written Old English didn't have macrons -- it had the "apex" (an acute accent looking mark) which could indicate long vowels, but was not too commonly used. However, if a form has [eu] in Proto-Germanic, then by standard linguistic reconstructions it generally had a long "eo" in Old English, which is often transcribed with a macron in modern editions, without being "fake" at all. AnonMoos (talk) 03:36, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Re: "Based on 'sounds like'." -- And here we have a fine example of why school systems should provide at least a brief introduction to historical linguistics. That along with a unit on source literacy would go a long way.

Anyway, this article is extensively sourced. It even contains overviews of some of the most recent (peer-reviewed) discussion available on the topic. The reality is that very few scholars today find reason to argue that Bede invented the goddess. Today discussion (where it occurs at all) instead focuses on questions like whether to take seriously Shaw's 'localized goddess' proposal. :bloodofox: (talk) 07:03, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Lead

The second and third sentences are not very reader-friendly, with their combination of colons, commas, IPAs, italics, asterisks and parentheses:

The name is reflected in Old English: *Ēastre ([ˈæːɑstre]; Northumbrian dialect: Ēastro, Mercian and West Saxon dialects: Ēostre [ˈeːostre]), Old High German: *Ôstara, and Old Saxon: *Āsteron. By way of the Germanic month bearing her name (Northumbrian: Ēosturmōnaþ, West Saxon: Ēastermōnaþ; Old High German: Ôstarmânoth), she is the namesake of the festival of Easter in some languages.

I'm also unsure what they mean. What is the basis for giving different OE spellings based on dialect? They are not marked as a reconstructed terms, but neither do they match the month names assigned to the same dialects. Srnec (talk) 00:12, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Asterisk means a textually-unattested form. The endings which it would have as a free-standing word are not necessarily the same as it would have when part of a compound. In the lead section, maybe better just to say that the forms of the word are reconstructed based on the month-names in several languages and dialects, without giving both sets of forms... AnonMoos (talk) 02:41, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

I know what the asterisk means. The dialectal forms are unmarked, but if the goddess is only directly attested in Bede, where do they come from? If the month names, then they are unattested as such and need asterisks. Further, I understand that one cannot just lop of "-month" to get the goddess's name in the various dialects, but the current lead implies that Northumbrian Ēostur- yields Ēastro while West Saxon Ēaster- yields Ēostre. Is that correct? Srnec (talk) 03:37, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

References