On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 10:35:33PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
Of course, that was a contribution to the mailing list, not the Wikipedia, but I did look it up first. The Oxford English Dictionary and Grimm are a little bit more reliable than Tacitus for the meaning of words, don't you think? And, of course, Latin picked up words from other languages, such as Celtic. Tacitus may have been right, but I did not make it up. Why would I have done that?
Tacitus was "on the ground" so to speak. He referenced his sources, and did a lot of legwork. He is the closest thing to a reliable, first-hand witness we have. I don't care to spend a lot of time debunking modern historical revisionists who have political axes to grind.
Jonathan