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Gothic language

Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other, mainly Romance, languages.

As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any sizable texts, but it lacks any modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the fourth century. The language was in decline by the mid-sixth century, partly because of the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation (in Spain, the Gothic language lost its last and probably already declining function as a church language when the Visigoths converted from Arianism to Nicene Christianity in 589).[3] The language survived as a domestic language in the Iberian peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal) as late as the eighth century. Gothic-seeming terms are found in manuscripts subsequent to this date, but these may or may not belong to the same language.


A language known as Crimean Gothic survived in the lower Danube area and in isolated mountain regions in Crimea as late as the second half of the 18th century. Lacking certain sound changes characteristic of Gothic, however, Crimean Gothic cannot be a lineal descendant of the language attested in the Codex Argenteus.[4][5]


The existence of such early attested texts makes Gothic a language of considerable interest in comparative linguistics.

The largest body of surviving documentation consists of various , mostly from the sixth century, copying the Bible translation that was commissioned by the Arian bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila, 311–382), leader of a community of Visigothic Christians in the Roman province of Moesia (modern-day Serbia, Bulgaria/Romania). He commissioned a translation into the Gothic language of the Greek Bible, of which translation roughly three-quarters of the New Testament and some fragments of the Old Testament have survived. The extant translated texts, produced by several scholars, are collected in the following codices and in one inscription:

codices

Only a few documents in Gothic have survived – not enough for a complete reconstruction of the language. Most Gothic-language sources are translations or glosses of other languages (namely, Greek), so foreign linguistic elements most certainly influenced the texts. These are the primary sources:


Reports of the discovery of other parts of Ulfilas' Bible have not been substantiated. Heinrich May in 1968 claimed to have found in England twelve leaves of a palimpsest containing parts of the Gospel of Matthew.


Only fragments of the Gothic translation of the Bible have been preserved. The translation was apparently done in the Balkans region by people in close contact with Greek Christian culture. The Gothic Bible apparently was used by the Visigoths in southern France until the loss of Visigothic France at the start of the 6th century,[10] in Visigothic Iberia until about 700, and perhaps for a time in Italy, the Balkans, and Ukraine until at least the mid-9th century. During the extermination of Arianism, Trinitarian Christians probably overwrote many texts in Gothic as palimpsests, or alternatively collected and burned Gothic documents. Apart from biblical texts, the only substantial Gothic document that still exists – and the only lengthy text known to have been composed originally in the Gothic language – is the Skeireins, a few pages of commentary on the Gospel of John.


Very few medieval secondary sources make reference to the Gothic language after about 800. In De incrementis ecclesiae Christianae (840–842), Walafrid Strabo, a Frankish monk who lived in Swabia, writes of a group of monks who reported that even then certain peoples in Scythia (Dobruja), especially around Tomis, spoke a sermo Theotiscus ('Germanic language'), the language of the Gothic translation of the Bible, and that they used such a liturgy.[11]


Many writers of the medieval texts that mention the Goths used the word Goths to mean any Germanic people in eastern Europe (such as the Varangians), many of whom certainly did not use the Gothic language as known from the Gothic Bible. Some writers even referred to Slavic-speaking people as "Goths". However, it is clear from Ulfilas' translation that – despite some puzzles – the Gothic language belongs with the Germanic language-group, not with Slavic.


Generally, the term "Gothic language" refers to the language of Ulfilas, but the attestations themselves date largely from the 6th century, long after Ulfilas had died.

diphthong

The "normal environment of occurrence" refers to native words. In foreign words, these environments are often greatly disturbed. For example, the short sounds /ɛ/ and /i/ alternate in native words in a nearly way, with /ɛ/ occurring in native words only before the consonants /h/, /hʷ/, /r/ while /i/ occurs everywhere else (nevertheless, there are a few exceptions such as /i/ before /r/ in hiri, /ɛ/ consistently in the reduplicating syllable of certain past-tense verbs regardless of the following consonant, which indicate that these sounds had become phonemicized). In foreign borrowings, however, /ɛ/ and /i/ occur freely in all environments, reflecting the corresponding vowel quality in the source language.

allophonic

Paradigmatic alterations can occur either intra-paradigm (between two different forms within a specific ) or cross-paradigm (between the same form in two different paradigms of the same class). Examples of intra-paradigm alternation are gawi /ɡa.wi/ "district (nom.)" vs. gáujis /ɡɔː.jis/ "district (gen.)"; mawi /ma.wi/ "maiden (nom.)" vs. máujōs /mɔː.joːs/ "maiden (gen.)"; þiwi /θi.wi/ "maiden (nom.)" vs. þiujōs /θiu.joːs/ "maiden (gen.)"; taui /tɔː.i/ "deed (nom.)" vs. tōjis /toː.jis/ "deed (gen.)"; náus /nɔːs/ "corpse (nom.)" vs. naweis /na.wiːs/ "corpses (nom.)"; triu /triu/?? "tree (nom.)" vs. triwis /tri.wis/ "tree (gen.)"; táujan /tɔː.jan/ "to do" vs. tawida /ta.wi.ða/ "I/he did"; stōjan /stoː.jan/ "to judge" vs. stauida /stɔː.i.ða/ "I/he judged". Examples of cross-paradigm alternation are Class IV verbs qiman /kʷiman/ "to come" vs. baíran /bɛran/ "to carry, to bear", qumans /kʷumans/ "(having) come" vs. baúrans /bɔrans/ "(having) carried"; Class VIIb verbs lētan /leː.tan/ "to let" vs. saian /sɛː.an/ "to sow" (note similar preterites laílōt /lɛ.loːt/ "I/he let", saísō /sɛ.soː/ "I/he sowed"). A combination of intra- and cross-paradigm alternation occurs in Class V sniwan /sni.wan/ "to hasten" vs. snáu /snɔː/ "I/he hastened" (expected *snaw, compare qiman "to come", qam "I/he came").

paradigm

The carefully maintained alternations between iu and iw suggest that iu may have been something other than /iu/. Various possibilities have been suggested (for example, high central or high back unrounded vowels, such as [ɨ] [ʉ] [ɯ]); under these theories, the spelling of iu is derived from the fact that the sound alternates with iw before a vowel, based on the similar alternations au and aw. The most common theory, however, simply posits /iu/ as the pronunciation of iu.

Macrons represent long ā and ū (however, long i appears as ei, following the representation used in the native alphabet). Macrons are often also used in the case of ē and ō; however, they are sometimes omitted since these vowels are always long. Long ā occurs only before the consonants /h/, /hʷ/ and represents nasalized /ãː(h)/ < earlier /aŋ(h)/; non-nasal /aː/ did not occur in Proto-Germanic. It is possible that the Gothic vowel still preserved the nasalization, or else that the nasalization was lost but the length distinction kept, as has happened with Lithuanian ą. Non-nasal /iː/ and /uː/ occurred in Proto-Germanic, however, and so long ei and ū occur in all contexts. Before /h/ and /hʷ/, long ei and ū could stem from either non-nasal or nasal long vowels in Proto-Germanic; it is possible that the nasalization was still preserved in Gothic but not written.

Proto-Germanic

A few Gothic runic inscriptions were found across Europe, but due to early Christianization of the Goths, the Runic writing was quickly replaced by the newly invented Gothic alphabet.


Ulfilas's Gothic, as well as that of the Skeireins and various other manuscripts, was written using an alphabet that was most likely invented by Ulfilas himself for his translation. Some scholars (such as Braune) claim that it was derived from the Greek alphabet only while others maintain that there are some Gothic letters of Runic or Latin origin.


A standardized system is used for transliterating Gothic words into the Latin script. The system mirrors the conventions of the native alphabet, such as writing long /iː/ as ei. The Goths used their equivalents of e and o alone only for long higher vowels, using the digraphs ai and au (much as in French) for the corresponding short or lower vowels. There are two variant spelling systems: a "raw" one that directly transliterates the original Gothic script and a "normalized" one that adds diacritics (macrons and acute accents) to certain vowels to clarify the pronunciation or, in certain cases, to indicate the Proto-Germanic origin of the vowel in question. The latter system is usually used in the academic literature.


The following table shows the correspondence between spelling and sound for vowels:


Notes:


The following table shows the correspondence between spelling and sound for consonants:

/a/, /i/ and /u/ can be either long or short. Gothic writing distinguishes between long and short vowels only for /i/ by writing i for the short form and ei for the long (a digraph or false diphthong), in an imitation of Greek usage (ει = /iː/). Single vowels are sometimes long where a historically present nasal consonant has been dropped in front of an /h/ (a case of compensatory lengthening). Thus, the preterite of the verb briggan [briŋɡan] "to bring" (English bring, Dutch brengen, German bringen) becomes brahta [braːxta] (English brought, Dutch bracht, German brachte), from Proto-Germanic *branhtē. In detailed transliteration, when the intent is more phonetic transcription, length is noted by a macron (or failing that, often a circumflex): brāhta, brâhta. This is the only context in which /aː/ appears natively whereas /uː/, like /iː/, is found often enough in other contexts: brūks "useful" (Dutch gebruik, German Gebrauch, Icelandic brúk "use").

[14]

/eː/ and /oː/ are long . They are written as e and o: neƕ [neːʍ] "near" (English nigh, Dutch nader, German nah); fodjan [foːdjan] "to feed".

close-mid vowels

/ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are short .[15] They are noted using the digraphs ai and au: taihun [tɛhun] "ten" (Dutch tien, German zehn, Icelandic tíu), dauhtar [dɔxtar] "daughter" (Dutch dochter, German Tochter, Icelandic dóttir). In transliterating Gothic, accents are placed on the second vowel of these digraphs and to distinguish them from the original diphthongs ái and áu: taíhun, daúhtar. In most cases short [ɛ] and [ɔ] are allophones of /i, u/ before /r, h, ʍ/.[16] Furthermore, the reduplication syllable of the reduplicating preterites has ai as well, which was probably pronounced as a short [ɛ].[17] Finally, short [ɛ] and [ɔ] occur in loan words from Greek and Latin (aípiskaúpus [ɛpiskɔpus] = ἐπίσκοπος "bishop", laíktjo [lɛktjoː] = lectio "lection", Paúntius [pɔntius] = Pontius).

open-mid vowels

The Germanic diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ appear as digraphs written ⟨ai⟩ and ⟨au⟩ in Gothic. Researchers have disagreed over whether they were still pronounced as diphthongs /ai̯/ and /au̯/ in Ulfilas's time (4th century) or had become long open-mid vowels: /ɛː/ and /ɔː/: ains [ains] / [ɛːns] "one" (German eins, Icelandic einn), augo [auɣoː] / [ɔːɣoː] "eye" (German Auge, Icelandic auga). It is most likely that the latter view is correct, as it is indisputable that the digraphs ⟨ai⟩ and ⟨au⟩ represent the sounds /ɛː/ and /ɔː/ in some circumstances (see below), and ⟨aj⟩ and ⟨aw⟩ were available to unambiguously represent the sounds /ai̯/ and /au̯/. The digraph ⟨aw⟩ is in fact used to represent /au/ in foreign words (such as Pawlus "Paul"), and alternations between ⟨ai⟩/⟨aj⟩ and ⟨au⟩/⟨aw⟩ are scrupulously maintained in paradigms where both variants occur (e.g. taujan "to do" vs. past tense tawida "did"). Evidence from transcriptions of Gothic names into Latin suggests that the sound change had occurred very recently when Gothic spelling was standardized: Gothic names with Germanic au are rendered with au in Latin until the 4th century and o later on (Austrogoti > Ostrogoti). The digraphs ⟨ai⟩ and ⟨au⟩ are normally written with an accent on the first vowel (ái, áu) when they correspond to Proto-Germanic /ai̯/ and /au̯/.

Long [ɛː] and [ɔː] also occur as allophones of /eː/ and /uː, oː/ respectively before a following vowel: waian [wɛːan] "to blow" (Dutch waaien, German wehen), bauan [bɔːan] "to build" (Dutch bouwen, German bauen, Icelandic búa "to live, reside"), also in Greek words Trauada "Troad" (Gk. Τρῳάς). In detailed transcription these are notated ai, au.

/y/ (pronounced like German ü and French u) is a Greek sound used only in borrowed words. It is transliterated as w (as it uses the same letter that otherwise denoted the consonant /w/): azwmus [azymus] "unleavened bread" ( < Gk. ἄζυμος). It represents an υ (y) or the diphthong οι (oi), both of which were pronounced [y] in the Greek of the time. Since the sound was foreign to Gothic, it was perhaps pronounced [i].

/iu/ is usually reconstructed as a falling diphthong ([iu̯]: diups [diu̯ps] "deep" (Dutch diep, German tief, Icelandic djúpur), though this has been disputed (see section above).

alphabet and transliteration

Greek diphthongs: In Ulfilas's era, all the diphthongs of Classical Greek had become simple vowels in speech (), except for αυ (au) and ευ (eu), which were probably pronounced [aβ] and [ɛβ] (they evolved into [av~af] and [ev~ef] in Modern Greek.) Ulfilas notes them, in words borrowed from Greek, as aw and aiw, probably pronounced [au̯, ɛu̯]: Pawlus [pau̯lus] "Paul" (Gk. Παῦλος), aíwaggelista [ɛwaŋɡeːlista] "evangelist" (Gk. εὐαγγελιστής, via the Latin evangelista).

monophthongization

All vowels (including diphthongs) can be followed by a [w], which was likely pronounced as the second element of a diphthong with roughly the sound of [u̯]. It seems likely that this is more of an instance of phonetic juxtaposition than of true diphthongs (such as, for example, the sound /aj/ in the French word paille ("straw"), which is not the diphthong /ai̯/ but rather a vowel followed by an ): alew [aleːw] "olive oil" ( < Latin oleum), snáiws [snɛːws] ("snow"), lasiws [lasiws] "tired" (English lazy).

approximant

vowel declensions

n-stem declensions

minor declensions: roots ending in -r, -nd and vestigial endings in other consonants, equivalent to other third declensions in Greek and Latin.

lack of ,

Germanic umlaut

lack of .

rhotacism

Influence[edit]

The reconstructed Proto-Slavic language features several apparent borrowed words from East Germanic (presumably Gothic), such as *xlěbъ, "bread", vs. Gothic hlaifs.[26]


The Romance languages also preserve several loanwords from Gothic, such as Portuguese agasalho (warm clothing), from Gothic *𐌲𐌰𐍃𐌰𐌻𐌾𐌰 (*gasalja, "companion, comrade"); ganso (goose), from Gothic *𐌲𐌰𐌽𐍃 (*gans, "goose"); luva (glove), from Gothic 𐌻𐍉𐍆𐌰 (lōfa, "palm of the hand"); and trégua (truce), from Gothic 𐍄𐍂𐌹𐌲𐌲𐍅𐌰 (triggwa, "treaty; covenant"). Other examples include the French broder (to embroider), from Gothic *𐌱𐍂𐌿𐌶𐌳𐍉𐌽 (*bruzdon, "to embroider"); gaffe (gaffe), from Gothic 𐌲𐌰𐍆𐌰𐌷 (gafāh, "catch; something which is caught"); and the Italian bega (quarrel, dispute), from Gothic *𐌱𐌴𐌲𐌰 (*bēga, "quarrel").

Use in Romanticism and the Modern Age[edit]

J. R. R. Tolkien[edit]

Several linguists have made use of Gothic as a creative language. The most famous example is "Bagme Bloma" ("Flower of the Trees") by J. R. R. Tolkien, part of Songs for the Philologists. It was published privately in 1936 for Tolkien and his colleague E. V. Gordon.[27]


Tolkien's use of Gothic is also known from a letter from 1965 to Zillah Sherring. When Sherring bought a copy of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in Salisbury, she found strange inscriptions in it; after she found his name in it, she wrote him a letter and asked him if the inscriptions were his, including the longest one on the back, which was in Gothic. In his reply to her he corrected some of the mistakes in the text; he wrote for example that hundai should be hunda and þizo boko ("of those books"), which he suggested should be þizos bokos ("of this book"). A semantic inaccuracy of the text which he mentioned himself is the use of lisan for read, while this was ussiggwan. Tolkien also made a calque of his own name in Gothic in the letter, which according to him should be Ruginwaldus Dwalakoneis.[28]


Gothic is also known to have served as the primary inspiration for Tolkien's invented language, Taliska[29] which, in his legendarium, was the language spoken by the race of Men during the First Age before being displaced by another of his invented languages, Adûnaic. As of 2022, Tolkien's Taliska grammar has not been published.

Others[edit]

On 10 February 1841, the Bayerische Akademie für Wissenschaften published a reconstruction in Gothic of the Creed of Ulfilas.[30]


The Thorvaldsen museum also has an alliterative poem, "Thunravalds Sunau", from 1841 by Massmann, the first publisher of the Skeireins, written in the Gothic language. It was read at a great feast dedicated to Thorvaldsen in the Gesellschaft der Zwanglosen in Munich on July 15, 1841. This event is mentioned by Ludwig von Schorn in the magazine Kunstblatt from the 19th of July, 1841.[31] Massmann also translated the academic commercium song Gaudeamus into Gothic in 1837.[32]


In 2012, professor Bjarne Simmelkjær Hansen of the University of Copenhagen published a translation into Gothic of Adeste Fideles for Roots of Europe.[33]


In Fleurs du Mal, an online magazine for art and literature, the poem Overvloed of Dutch poet Bert Bevers appeared in a Gothic translation.[34]


Alice in Wonderland has been translated into Gothic (Balþos Gadedeis Aþalhaidais in Sildaleikalanda) by David Carlton in 2015 and is published by Michael Everson.[35][36]

Geats

Gutes

List of Germanic languages

Modern Gutnish

Name of the Goths

Old Gutnish

Thurneysen's law

G. H. Balg: A Gothic grammar with selections for reading and a glossary. New York: Westermann & Company, 1883 ().

archive.org

G. H. Balg: A comparative glossary of the Gothic language with especial reference to English and German. New York: Westermann & Company, 1889 ().

archive.org

Bennett, William Holmes (1980). An Introduction to the Gothic Language. New York: Modern Language Association of America.

ISBN

"The Development of the Gothic Short/Lax Subsystem", in Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung, 93/2, 1979, pp. 272–278.

Fausto Cercignani

"The Reduplicating Syllable and Internal Open Juncture in Gothic", in Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung, 93/1, 1979, pp. 126–132.

Fausto Cercignani

"The Enfants Terribles of Gothic 'Breaking': hiri, aiþþau, etc.", in The Journal of Indo-European Studies, 12/3–4, 1984, pp. 315–344.

Fausto Cercignani

"The Development of the Gothic Vocalic System", in Germanic Dialects: Linguistic and Philological Investigations, edited by Bela Brogyanyi and Thomas Krömmelbein, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, Benjamins, 1986, pp. 121–151.

Fausto Cercignani

N. Everett, "Literacy from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages, c. 300–800 AD", The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy, ed. D. Olson and N. Torrance (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 362–385.

"Traces of Wulfila's Bible Translation in Visigothic Gaul", Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 80 (2020) pp. 5–24.

Carla Falluomini

Kortlandt, Frederik (2001). (PDF). Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik. 55: 21–25. doi:10.1163/18756719-055-01-90000004.

"The origin of the Goths"

W. Krause, Handbuch des Gotischen, 3rd edition, 1968, Munich.

Thomas O. Lambdin, An Introduction to the Gothic Language, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006, Eugene, Oregon.

Miller, D. Gary (2019). The Oxford Gothic Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  978-0198813590.

ISBN

F. Mossé, Manuel de la langue gotique, Aubier Éditions Montaigne, 1942

A Comparative Germanic Grammar, 1939, The Linguistic Society of America for Yale University.

E Prokosch

Irmengard Rauch, Gothic Language: Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Readings, Peter Lang Publishing Inc; 2nd Revised edition, 2011

C. Rowe, "The problematic Holtzmann’s Law in Germanic", Indogermanische Forschungen, Bd. 108, 2003. 258–266.

(1868). A Moeso-Gothic glossary. London: Asher & Co.

Skeat, Walter William

Stearns, MacDonald (1978). Crimean Gothic. Analysis and Etymology of the Corpus. Saratoga, California: Anma Libri.  0-915838-45-1.

ISBN

Die gotische Bibel , 4th edition, 1965, Heidelberg

Wilhelm Streitberg

Joseph Wright

Grammar of the Gothic language

Portal for information on Gothic (in German)

Gotisch im WWW

– early (Public Domain) editions of several of the references.

Germanic Lexicon Project

The Gothic Bible in Latin alphabet

by Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum, free online lessons at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Gothic Online

Video clips in Gothic language

Gothic Readings

Gothic basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database

A page with information about the discovered Bononiensa fragment from 2013

Gotica Bononiensa

an online collection of introductory videos to Ancient Indo-European languages produced by the University of Göttingen

glottothèque – Ancient Indo-European Grammars online