Gothic language

Words in Gothic written in this article are transliterated into the Roman alphabet using the system described on the Gothic alphabet page.

Gothic is an extinct 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 sizable corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loan-words in other languages like Spanish and French.

As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It is the Germanic language with the earliest attestation but has no modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the 4th century. The language was in decline by the mid-6th century, due in part to 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 to Catholicism in 589)^[1]. The language survived as a domestic language in the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) as late as the 8th century, and Frankish author Walafrid Strabo wrote that it was still spoken in the lower Danube area and in isolated mountain regions in Crimea in the early 9th century (see Crimean Gothic). Gothic-seeming terms found in later (post-9th century) manuscripts may not belong to the same language.

The existence of such early attested corpora makes it a language of considerable interest in comparative linguistics.

History and evidence

leaf of the Codex Ambrosianus B

There are only a few surviving documents in Gothic, not enough to completely reconstruct the language.

• The largest body of surviving documentation consists of codices written and commissioned by the Arian bishop Ulfilas (also known as Wulfila, 311-382), who was the leader of a community of Visigothic Christians in the Roman province of Moesia (modern Bulgaria/Romania). He commissioned a translation of the Greek Bible into the Gothic language, of which roughly three-quarters of the New Testament and some fragments of the Old Testament have survived.

• Codex Argenteus (Uppsala) (and the Speyer fragment): 188 leaves.

The best preserved Gothic manuscript, the Codex Argenteus, dates from the 6th century and was preserved and transmitted by northern Ostrogoths in modern Italy. It contains a large part of the four Gospels. Since it is a translation from Greek, the language of the Codex Argenteus is replete with borrowed Greek words and Greek usages. The syntax in particular is often copied directly from the Greek.

• Codex Ambrosianus (Milan) (and the Codex Taurinensis): Five parts, totaling 193 leaves.

The Codex Ambrosianus contains scattered passages from the New Testament (including parts of the Gospels and the Epistles), of the Old Testament (Nehemiah), and some commentaries known as Skeireins. It is therefore likely that the text had been somewhat modified by copyists.

• Codex Gissensis (Gießen): 1 leaf, fragments of Luke 23-24. It was found in Egypt in 1907, but destroyed by water damage in 1945.
• Codex Carolinus: (Wolfenbüttel): 4 leaves, fragments of Romans 11-15.
• Codex Vaticanus Latinus 5750: 3 leaves, pages 57/58, 59/60 and 61/62 of the Skeireins.

• A scattering of old documents: alphabets, calendars, glosses found in a number of manuscripts and a few runic inscriptions (between 3 and 13) that are known to be or suspected to be Gothic. Some scholars believe that these inscriptions are not at all Gothic (see Braune/Ebbinghaus "Gotische Grammatik" Tübingen 1981)
• A small dictionary of more than eighty words, and a song without translation, compiled by the Fleming Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador to the court of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul from 1555 to 1562, who was curious to find out about the language and by arrangement met two speakers of Crimean Gothic and listed the terms in his compilation Turkish Letters. These terms are from nearly a millennium later and are therefore not representative of the language of Ulfilas. See Crimean Gothic.

There have been unsubstantiated reports of the discovery of other parts of Ulfilas' bible. Heinrich May in 1968 claimed to have found in England 12 leaves of a palimpsest containing parts of the Gospel of Matthew. The claim was never substantiated.

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. It appears that the Gothic Bible was used by the Visigoths in Iberia until circa 700 AD, and perhaps for a time in Italy, the Balkans and what is now Ukraine. In exterminating Arianism, many texts in Gothic were probably expunged and overwritten as palimpsests, or collected and burned. Apart from Biblical texts, the only substantial Gothic document which 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.

There are very few references to the Gothic language in secondary sources after about 800. In De incrementis ecclesiae Christianae (840/2), Walafrid Strabo, who lived in Swabia, speaks of a group of monks, who reported that "even now certain peoples in Scythia (Dobrudja), especially around Tomis" spoke a sermo Theotiscus (Germanic language), which was the language of the Gothic translation of the Bible, and used such a liturgy.^[2] He also refers to the use of Ulfilas' bible in a region probably around Lake Constance. In the former case, the language spoken by the monks was probably an incipient Crimean Gothic.

In evaluating medieval texts that mention the Goths, it must be noted that many writers 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 some Slavic-speaking people,like Croats, as Goths.

The relationship between the language of the Crimean Goths and Ulfilas' Gothic is less clear. The few fragments of their language from the 16th century show significant differences from the language of the Gothic Bible, although some of the glosses, such as ada for "egg", imply a common heritage, and Gothic mena ("moon"), compared to Crimean Gothic mine, clearly indicates that Crimean Gothic was East Germanic.

Generally, the Gothic language refers to the language of Ulfilas, but the attestations themselves are largely from the 6th century - long after Ulfilas had died. The above list is not exhaustive, and a more extensive list is available on the website of the Wulfila Project.

Alphabet

Ulfilas' 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 (e.g. 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.

This Gothic alphabet has nothing to do with Blackletter (also called Gothic script), which was used to write the Roman alphabet from the 12th to 14th centuries and evolved into the Fraktur writing later used to write German.

Sounds

It is possible to determine more or less exactly how the Gothic of Ulfilas was pronounced, primarily through comparative phonetic reconstruction. Furthermore, because Ulfilas tried to follow the original Greek text as much as possible in his translation, we know that he used the same writing conventions as those of contemporary Greek. Since the Greek of that period is well documented, it is possible to reconstruct much of Gothic pronunciation from translated texts. In addition, the way in which non-Greek names are transcribed in the Greek Bible and in Ulfilas' Bible is very informative.

Vowels

Monophthongs

Diphthongs

• /a/, /i/ and /u/ can be either long or short.^[3] Gothic writing distinguishes between long and short vowels only for /i/ - writing i for the short form and ei for the long (a digraph or false diphthong), in 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 the proto-Germanic *braŋk-dē. In detailed transliteration, where the intent is more phonetic transcription, length is noted by a macron (or failing that, often a circumflex): brāhta, brâhta. /uː/ is found often enough in other contexts: brūks "useful" (Dutch gebruik, German Gebrauch, Icelandic brúk "use").
• /eː/ and /oː/ are long close-mid vowels. They are written as e and o: neƕ [neːʍ] "near" (English nigh, Dutch nader, German nah); fodjan [foːdjan] "to feed".
• /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are short open-mid vowels.^[4] 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 aí and aú 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/.^[5] Furthermore, the reduplication syllable of the reduplicating preterites has ai as well, which is probably pronounced as a short [ɛ].^[6] Finally, short [ɛ] and [ɔ] occur in loan words from Greek and Latin (aípiskaúpus [ɛpiskɔpus] = ἐπίσκοπος "bishop", laíktjo [lɛktjoː] = lectio "lection", Paúntius [pɔntius] = Pontius).
• The Germanic diphthongs ai and au appear as ai and au in Gothic (normally written with an accent on the first vowel to distinguish them from ai, au < Germanic i/e, u). Some researchers suppose that they were still pronounced as diphthongs in Gothic, i.e. /ai/ and /au/, whereas others think that they have become long open-mid vowels, i.e. /ɛː/ and /ɔː/: ains [ains] / [ɛːns] "one" (German eins, Icelandic einn), augo [auɣoː] / [ɔːɣoː] "eye" (German Auge, Icelandic auga). In Latin sources Gothic names with Germanic au are rendered with au until the 4th century and o later on (Austrogoti > Ostrogoti).
• 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 "live"), also in Greek words Trauada "Troad" (Gk. Τρῳάς).
• /y/ (pronounced like German ü and French u) is a Greek sound used only in borrowed words. It is transliterated as w in vowel positions: azwmus [azymus] "unleavened bread" (< Gk. ἄζυμος). It represents an υ (y) or the diphthong οι (oi) in Greek, both of which were pronounced [y] in period Greek. Since the sound was foreign to Gothic, it was most perhaps pronounced [i].
• /iu/ is a descending diphthong, i.e. [iu̯] and not [i̯u]: diups [diu̯ps] "deep" (Dutch diep, German tief, Icelandic djúpur).
• Greek diphthongs: In Ulfilas' era, all the diphthongs of classical Greek had become simple vowels in speech (monophthongization), except for αυ (au) and ευ (eu), which were probably still 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 [au, ɛu]: Pawlus [paulus] "Paul" (Gk. Παῦλος), aíwaggelista [ɛwaŋɡeːlista] "evangelist" (Gk. εὐαγγελιστής, via the Latin evangelista).
• Simple vowels and diphthongs (original and spurious ones) can be followed by a [w], which was likely pronounced as the second element of a diphthong with roughly the sound of [u]. It seems likely that this is more of an instance of phonetic coalescence than of phonological diphthongs (such as, for example, the sound /aj/ in the French word paille ("straw"), which is not the diphthong /ai/ but rather a vowel followed by an approximant): alew [aleːw] "olive oil" (< Latin oleum), snáiws [snɛːws] ("snow"), lasiws [lasiws] "tired" (English lazy).

Consonants

In general, Gothic consonants are devoiced at the ends of words. Gothic is rich in fricative consonants (although many of them may have been approximants, it is hard to separate the two) derived by the processes described in Grimm's law and Verner's law and characteristic of Germanic languages. Gothic is unusual among Germanic languages in having a /z/ phoneme which has not become /r/ through rhotacization. Furthermore, the doubling of written consonants between vowels suggests that Gothic made distinctions between long and short, or geminated consonants: atta [atːa] "dad", kunnan [kunːan] "to know" (Dutch kennen, German kennen "to know", Icelandic kunna).

Stops

• The voiceless stops /p/, /t/ and /k/ are regularly noted by p, t and k respectively: paska [paska] ("Easter", from the Greek πάσχα), tuggo [tuŋɡoː] ("tongue"), kalbo [kalboː] ("calf"). The stops probably had (non-phonemic) aspiration like in most modern Germanic languages: [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ].
• The letter q is probably a voiceless labiovelar stop, /kʷ/ ([kʷʰ]), comparable to the Latin qu: qiman [kʷiman] "to come". In the later Germanic languages this phoneme has become either a consonant cluster /kw/ of a voiceless velar stop + a labio-velar approximant (English qu) or a simple voiceless velar stop /k/ (English c, k)
• The voiced stops /b/, /d/ and /ɡ/ are noted by the letters b, d and g. Like the other Germanic languages, they occurred in word-initial position, when doubled and after a nasal. In addition, they apparently occurred after other consonants, e.g. arbi [arbi] "inheritance", huzd [huzd] "treasure". (This conclusion is based on their behavior at the end of a word, where they do not change into voiceless fricatives, unlike when occurring after a vowel.)
• There was probably also a voiced labiovelar stop, /ɡʷ/, which was written with the digraph gw. It occurred after a nasal, e.g. saggws [saŋɡʷs] "song", or long as a regular outcome of Germanic *ww, e.g. triggws [triɡʷːs] "faithful" (English true, German treu, Icelandic tryggur).
• Similarly the letters ddj, which is the regular outcome of Germanic *jj, may represent a voiced palatal stop, /ɟː/: waddjus [waɟːe] "wall" (Icelandic veggur), twaddje [twaɟːeː] " two (genitive)" (Icelandic tveggja).

Fricatives

• /s/ and /z/ are usually written s and z. The latter corresponds to Germanic *z (which has become r or silent in the other Germanic languages); at the end of a word, it is regularly devoiced to s. E.g. saíhs [sɛhs] "six", máiza [mɛːza] "greater" (English more, Dutch meer, German mehr, Swedish mer) ~ máis [mɛːs] "more, rather".
• /ɸ/ and /θ/, written f and þ, are voiceless bilabial and voiceless dental fricatives respectively. It is likely that the relatively unstable sound /ɸ/ became /f/. f and þ are also derived from b and d at the ends of words, when they are devoiced and become approximants: gif [ɡiɸ] "give (imperative)" (infinitive giban: German geben), miþ [miθ] "with" (Old English mid, Old Norse með, Dutch met, German mit).
• /h/ is written as h: haban "to have". It was probably pronounced [h] in word-final position and before a consonant as well (not [x], since /ɡ/ > [x] is written g, not h): jah [jah] "and" (Dutch, German, Scandinavian ja "yes").

• [x] is an allophone of /ɡ/ at the end of a word or before a voiceless consonant; it is always written g: dags [daxs] "day" (German Tag). In some borrowed Greek words, we find the special letter x, which represents the Greek letter χ (ch): Xristus [xristus] "Christ" (Gk. Χριστός). It may also have signified a /k/.
• [β], [ð] and [ɣ] are voiced fricatives only found between vowels. They are allophones of /b/, /d/ and /ɡ/ and are not distinguished from them in writing. [β] may have become /v/, a more stable labiodental form (a case of fortition). In the study of Germanic languages, these phonemes are usually transcribed as ƀ, đ and ǥ respectively: haban [haβan] "to have", þiuda [θiu̯ða] "people" (Old Norse þióð/þiúð, Dutch Diets, German Deutsch > English Dutch), áugo [auɣoː] "eye" (English eye, Dutch oog, German Auge). When occurring after a vowel at the end of a word or before a voiceless consonant, these sounds become unvoiced /ɸ/, /θ/ and [x], e.g. hláifs /hlɛːɸs/ "loaf" but genitive hláibis /hlɛːβis/ "of a loaf", plural hláibōs /hlɛːβoːs/ "loaves".
• ƕ (also transcribed hw) is a labiovelar variant of /x/ (derived from the proto-Indo-European kʷ). It probably was pronounced /ʍ/ (a voiceless /w/) as it is in certain dialects of English and is predominant in Scots, where it is always written as wh: ƕan /ʍan/ "when", ƕar /ʍar/ "where", ƕeits [ʍiːts] "white".

Sonorants

Gothic has three nasal consonants, of which one is an allophone of the others, found only in complementary distribution with them. Nasals in Gothic, like most languages, are pronounced at the same point of articulation as either the consonant that follows them ( assimilation). Therefore, clusters like [md] and [nb] are not possible.

• /n/ and /m/ are freely distributed - they can be found in any position in a syllable and form minimal pairs except in certain contexts where they are neutralized: /n/ before a bilabial consonant becomes [m], while /m/ preceding a dental stop becomes [n], as per the principle of assimilation described in the previous paragraph. In front of a velar stop, they both become [ŋ]. /n/ and /m/ are transcribed as n and m, and in writing neutralisation is marked: sniumundo /sniu̯mundoː/ ("quickly").
• [ŋ] is not a phoneme and cannot appear freely in Gothic. It is present where a nasal consonant is neutralised before a velar stop and is in a complementary distribution with /n/ and /m/. Following Greek conventions, it is normally written as g (sometimes n): þagkjan [θaŋkjan] "to think", sigqan [siŋkʷan] "to sink" ~ þankeiþ [θaŋkiːθ] "thinks". The cluster ggw sometimes denotes [ŋɡʷ], but sometimes [ɡʷː] (see above).
• /w/ is transliterated as w before a vowel: weis [wiːs] ("we"), twái [twai] "two" (German zwei).
• /j/ is written as j: jer [jeːr] "year", sakjo [sakjoː] "strife".
• /l/ is used much as in English and other European languages: laggs [laŋks] "long", mel [meːl] "hour" (English meal,Dutch maal, German Mahl, Icelandic mál).
• /r/ is a trilled /r/ (or possibly a flap /ɾ/): raíhts [rɛxts] "right", afar [afar] "after".
• /l/, /m/, /n/ and /r/ act as the nucleus of a syllable ("vowels") after the final consonant of a word or between two consonants. This is also the case in modern English: for example, "bottle" is pronounced [bɒtl̩] in many dialects. Some Gothic examples: tagl [taɣl̩] "hair" (English tail, Icelandic tagl), máiþms [mɛːθm̩s] "gift", táikns [tɛːkn̩s] "sign" (English token, Dutch teken, German Zeichen, Icelandic tákn) and tagr [taɣr̩] "tear (as in crying)".

Accentuation and Intonation

Accentuation in Gothic can be reconstructed through phonetic comparison, Grimm's law and Verner's law. Gothic used a stress accent rather than the pitch accent of proto-Indo-European. It is indicated by the fact that long vowels [eː] and [oː] were shortened and the short vowels [a] and [i] were lost in unstressed syllables.

Just as in other Germanic languages, the free moving Indo-European accent was fixed on the first syllable of simple words. (For example, in modern English, nearly all words that do not have accents on the first syllable—except when they have unaccented prefixes as in "beget" or "forgive"--are borrowed from other languages.) Accents do not shift when words are inflected. In most compound words, the location of the stress depends on its placement in the second part:

• In compounds where the second word is a noun, the accent is on the first syllable of the first word of the compound.
• In compounds where the second word is a verb, the accent falls on the first syllable of the verbal component. Elements prefixed to verbs are otherwise unstressed, except in the context of separable words (words that can be broken in two parts and separated in regular usage, for example, separable verbs in German and Dutch) - in those cases, the prefix is stressed.

Examples: (with comparable words from modern Germanic languages)

• Non-compound words: marka [ˈmarka] "border, borderlands" (English "march" as in the Spanish Marches); aftra [ˈaftra] "after"; bidjan [ˈbidjan] "pray" (Dutch, bidden, German bitten, Icelandic biðja, English bid).
• Compound words:
  • Noun second element: guda-láus [ˈɡuðalaus] "godless".
  • Verb second element: ga-láubjan [ɡaˈlauβjan] "believe" (Dutch geloven, German glauben < Old High German g(i)louben by syncope of the atonic i).

Grammar

Morphology

Nouns and Adjectives

Gothic preserves many archaic Indo-European features that are not always present in modern Germanic languages, in particular the rich Indo-European declension system. Gothic had nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases, as well as vestiges of a vocative case that was sometimes identical to the nominative and sometimes to the accusative. The three genders of Indo-European were all present, including the neuter gender of modern German and Icelandic and to some extent modern Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish - in opposition to the "common gender" (genus commune) which those languages apply to both masculine and feminine nouns. Nouns and adjectives were inflected according to one of two grammatical numbers: the singular and the plural.

One of the most striking characteristics of the Germanic languages is the division of nouns between those with weak declensions (generally those where the root word ends in an n) and those with strong declensions (those whose roots end in a vowel or an inflexional suffix indicative of a pronoun). This separation is particularly important in Gothic. While a noun can only belong to one class of declensions, depending on the end of the root word, some adjectives can be either strongly or weakly declined, depending on their meaning. An adjective employed with a particular meaning and accompanied by a deictic article, like the demonstrative pronouns sa, þata, or so which act as definite articles, took a weak declension, while adjectives used with indefinite articles had a strong declension.

This process is found in, e.g., German and Swedish, where adjectives are declined not only according to gender and number, but also according to indeterminate/determinate form:

Descriptive adjectives in Gothic (as well as superlatives ending in -ist and -ost) and the past participle may take either declension. Some pronouns only take the weak declension; for example: sama (English "same"), adjectives like unƕeila ("constantly", from the root ƕeila, "time"; compare to the English "while"), comparative adjectives, and present participles. Others, such as áins ("some"), take only the strong declension.

The table below displays the declension of the Gothic adjective blind (English: "blind") with a weak noun (guma - "man") and a strong one (dags - "day"):

This table is, of course, not exhaustive. (There are secondary inflexions, particularly for the strong neuter singular and irregular nouns among other contexts, which are not described here.) An exhaustive table of only the types of endings Gothic took is presented below.

• strong declension :
  • roots ending in -a, -ja, -wa (masculine and neuter): equivalent to the Greek and Latin second declension in ‑us / ‑i and ‑ος / ‑ου;
  • roots ending in -o, -jo and -wo (feminine): equivalent to the Greek and Latin first declension in ‑a / ‑æ and ‑α / ‑ας (‑η / ‑ης);
  • roots ending in -i (masculine and feminine): equivalent to the Greek and Latin third declension in ‑is (acc. ‑im) and ‑ις / ‑εως;
  • roots ending in -u (all three genders) : equivalent to the Latin fourth declension in ‑us / ‑us and the Greek third declension in ‑υς / ‑εως;
• weak declension (all roots ending in -n), equivalent to the Greek and Latin third declension in ‑o / ‑onis and ‑ων / ‑ονος or ‑ην / ‑ενος:
  • roots ending in -an, -jan, -wan (masculine);
  • roots ending in -on and -ein (feminine);
  • roots ending in -n (neuter): equivalent to the Greek and Latin third declension in ‑men / ‑minis and ‑μα / ‑ματος;
• minor declensions : roots ending in -r, en -nd and vestigial endings in other consonants, equivalent to other third declensions in Greek and Latin.

Gothic adjectives follow noun declensions closely - they take same types of inflexion.

Pronouns

Gothic inherited the full set of Indo-European pronouns: personal pronouns (including reflexive pronouns for each of the three grammatical persons), possessive pronouns, both simple and compound demonstratives, relative pronouns, interrogatives and indefinite pronouns. Each follows a particular pattern of inflexion (partially mirroring the noun declension), much like other Indo-European languages. One particularly noteworthy characteristic is the preservation of the dual number, referring to two people or things while the plural was only used for quantities greater than two. Thus, "the two of us" and "we" for numbers greater than two were expressed as wit and weis respectively. While proto-Indo-European used the dual for all grammatical categories that took a number (as did classical Greek and Sanskrit), most Old Germanic languages are unusual in that they only preserved it for pronouns. Gothic preserves an older system with dual marking on both pronouns and verbs (but not nouns or adjectives).

The simple demonstrative pronoun sa (neuter: þata, feminine: so, from the Indo-European root *so, *seh₂, *tod; cognate to the Greek article ὁ, ἡ, τό and the Latin istud) can be used as an article, allowing constructions of the type definite article + weak adjective + noun.

The interrogative pronouns begin with ƕ-, which derives from the proto-Indo-European consonant *k^w that was present at the beginning of all interrogratives in proto-Indo-European. This is cognate with the wh- at the beginning of many English interrogatives which, as in Gothic, are pronounced with [ʍ] in some dialects. This same etymology is present in the interrogatives of many other Indo-European languages": w- [v] in German, hv- in Danish, the Latin qu- (which persists in modern Romance languages), the Greek τ or π, and the Sanskrit k- as well as many others.

Verbs

The bulk of Gothic verbs follow the type of Indo-European conjugation called "thematic" because they insert a vowel derived from the reconstructed proto-Indo-European phonemes *e or *o between roots and inflexional suffixes. This pattern is also present in Greek and Latin:

• Latin - leg-i-mus ("we read"): root leg- + thematic vowel -i- (from *e) + suffix -mus.
• Greek - λύ-ο-μεν ("we untie"): root λυ- + thematic vowel -ο- + suffix -μεν.
• Gothic - nim-a-m ("we take"): root nim- + thematic vowel -a- (from *o) + suffix -m.

The other conjugation, called "athematic", where suffixes are added directly to roots, exists only in unproductive vestigial forms in Gothic, just as it does in Greek and Latin. The most important such instance is the verb "to be", which is athematic in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and many other Indo-European languages.

Gothic verbs are, like nouns and adjectives, divided into strong verbs and weak verbs. Weak verbs are characterised by preterites formed by appending the suffixes -da or -ta, parallel to past participles formed with -þ / -t. Strong verbs form preterites by ablaut (the alternating of vowels in their root forms), or by reduplication (prefixing the root with the first consonant in the root plus aí), but without adding a suffix in either case. This parallels the Greek and Sanskrit perfects. This dichotomy is still present in modern Germanic languages:

• weak verbs ("to have") :
  • Gothic: haban, preterite habáida, past participle habáiþs ;
  • English: (to) have, preterite had, past participle had ;
  • German: haben, preterite hatte, past participle (ge)habt ;
  • Icelandic: hafa, preterite hafði, past participle haft ;
  • Dutch: hebben, preterite had, past participle (ge)had ;
  • Swedish: ha(va), preterite hade, supine haft ;

• strong verbs ("to give") :
  • Gothic: infinitive giban, preterite gaf ;
  • English: infinitive (to) give, preterite gave ;
  • German: infinitive geben, preterite gab ;
  • Icelandic: infinitive gefa, preterite gaf.
  • Dutch: infinitive geven, preterite gaf ;
  • Swedish: infinitive giva (ge), preterite gav ;

Verbal inflexions in Gothic have two grammatical voices: the active and the medial; three numbers: singular, dual (except in the third person), and plural; two tenses: present and preterite (derived from a former perfect); three grammatical moods: indicative, subjunctive (from an old optative form) and imperative; as well as three kinds of nominal forms: a present infinitive, a present participle, and a past passive. Not all tenses and persons are represented in all moods and voices - some conjugations use auxiliary forms.

Finally, there are forms called "preterite-present" - old Indo-European perfect - that were reinterpreted as present tense. The Gothic word wáit, from the proto-Indo-European *woid-h₂e ("to see" in the perfect), corresponds exactly to its Sanskrit cognate véda and in Greek to ϝοἶδα. Both etymologically should mean "I saw" (in the perfective sense) but mean "I know" (in the preterite-present meaning). Latin follows the same rule with nōuī ("I knew" and "I know"). The preterite-present verbs include áigan ("to possess") and kunnan ("to know") among others.

Syntax

The syntax of Gothic is similar to that of other old Germanic languages, such as Old English and Old Norse. The word order of Gothic is fairly free, like that of other heavily inflected languages with several noun cases. The natural word order of Gothic is assumed to have been like that of the other old Germanic languages (essentially similar to Modern German word order); however, nearly all extant Gothic texts are translations of Greek originals and have been heavily influenced by Greek syntax.

Clitics

An important and archaic feature of Gothic that is missing from all other Germanic languages is the presence of various clitic particles that are placed in second position in a sentence, in accordance with Wackernagel's Law, for example ab-u þus silbin "of thyself?" where -u is a clitic indicating that a yes/no question is being asked and is attached to the first word of the clause, similar to -ne in Latin. Note that the prepositional phrase without the clitic appears as af þus silbin -- the clitic causes originally voiced fricatives, unvoiced at the end of a word, to revert to their voiced form; another such example is wileid-u "do you (pl.) want" from wileiþ "you (pl.) want". If the first word has a preverb attached, the clitic actually splits the preverb from the verb, e.g. ga-u-láubjats "do you both believe ...?" from galáubjats "you both believe". Another such clitic is -uh "and", appearing as -h after a vowel: ga-h-mēlida "and he wrote" from gamēlida "he wrote", urreis nim-uh "arise and take!" from the imperative form nim "take". Multiple such clitics can occur, e.g. diz-uh-þan-sat ijōs "and then he seized them (fem.)" from dissat "he seized" (notice again the voicing of diz-), ga-u-ƕa-sēƕi "whether he saw anything" from gasēƕi "he saw".

Gothic compared to other Germanic languages

For the most part, Gothic is known to be significantly closer to Proto-Germanic than any other Germanic language, except for that of the (scantily attested) early Norse runic inscriptions. This has made it invaluable in the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic. In fact, Gothic tends to serve as the primary foundation for reconstructing Proto-Germanic. The reconstructed Proto-Germanic conflicts with Gothic only when there is clearly identifiable evidence from other branches that the Gothic form is a secondary development.

Features

Gothic fails to display a number of innovations shared by all later-attested Germanic languages:

• Lack of Germanic umlaut
• Lack of rhotacism

The language also has many features mostly absent in other early Germanic languages:

• Dual inflections on verbs
• A morphological passive voice for verbs
• Reduplication in the past tense of Class VII strong verbs
• Clitic conjunctions that appear in second position of a sentence in accordance with Wackernagel's Law, splitting verbs from preverbs

The following sections describe some of these features in more detail.

Lack of umlaut

Most conspicuously, Gothic shows no sign of morphological umlaut. Gothic fotus, pl. fotjus, can be contrasted with English foot : feet, German Fuß : Füße, Old Icelandic fótr : fœtr, Danish fod : fødder. These forms contain the characteristic change /o:/ > /ø:/ (> Eng. /i:/, Germ. /y:/) due to i-umlaut; the Gothic form shows no such change.

Lack of rhotacism

Proto-Germanic *z remains in Gothic as z or is devoiced to s. In North and West Germanic, *z changes to r by rhotacism.

• Gothic dius, gen. sg. diuzis
• Old English dēor, gen. sg. dēores "wild animal" (Modern English deer)

Passive voice

Gothic retains a morphological passive voice inherited from Indo-European, but unattested in all other Germanic languages, except for the single fossilised form preserved in, for example, Old English hātte or Runic Norse (AD 400) haitē "am called", derived from the verb *haitanaN "to call, command". (Note that the related verb 'heißen in modern German is derived from the active voice of this verb but has the passive meaning "to be called".)

Dual number

Gothic verbs retain forms marked for dual number, which is absent from the other Germanic languages. They exist in the first and second person only, and only in the active voice; in all other cases, the corresponding plural forms are used. In common with other Germanic languages, Gothic has first and second person dual pronouns, e.g. Gothic/Old English/Old Norse wit "we two" (thought to have been in fact derived from *wi-du literally "we two").

Reduplication

Gothic possesses a number of verbs which form their preterite by reduplication, another archaic feature inherited from Indo-European. While traces of this category survived elsewhere in Germanic, the phenomenon is largely obscured in these other languages by later sound changes and analogy. In the following examples the infinitive is compared to the 3rd person singular preterite indicative:

• Gothic saian "to sow" : saiso
• Old Norse sá : seri < Proto-Germanic *sezō

• Gothic laikan "to play" : lailaik
• Old English lācan : leolc, lēc

The grouping of Gothic

The standard theory of the origin of the Germanic languages divides the languages into three groups: East Germanic (Gothic and a few other very scantily attested languages), North Germanic (Old Norse and its derivatives, such as Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese) and West Germanic (all others, including Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian and numerous modern languages derived from these). The North Germanic and West Germanic languages are further grouped into the Northwest Germanic languages, indicating that Gothic was the first attested language to branch off.

A minority opinion (the so-called Gotho-Nordic Hypothesis) instead groups North Germanic and East Germanic together. This is partly based on historical claims: For example, Jordanes, writing in the 6th century, ascribes to the Goths a Scandinavian origin. There are a few linguistically significant areas where Gothic and Old Norse agree against the West Germanic languages. Perhaps the most obvious is the evolution of the Proto-Germanic *-jj- and *-ww- into Gothic ddj (from Pre-Gothic ggj?) and ggw, and Old Norse ggj and ggv ("Holtzmann's Law"), in contrast to West Germanic where they remained as semivowels. Compare Modern English true, German treu, with Gothic triggws, Old Norse tryggr. However, it has been suggested that these are in fact two separate and unrelated changes.^[7] There are a number of other posited similarities (e.g. the existence of numerous inchoative verbs ending in -na, such as Gothic ga-waknan, Old Norse vakna; and the absence of gemination before j, or (in the case of old Norse) only g geminated before j, e.g. Proto-Germanic *kunjam > Gothic kuni (kin), Old Norse kyn, but Old English cynn, Old High German kunni). However, for the most part these represent shared retentions, which are not valid means of grouping languages. That is, if a parent language splits into three daughters A, B and C, and C innovates in a particular area while A and B don't change, then A and B will appear to agree against C. However, this example of a shared retention in A and B is not necessarily indicative of any special relationship among the two. Similar claims of similarities between Old Gutnish (Gutniska) and Old Norse are also based on shared retentions rather than shared innovations.

Another commonly given example is that Gothic and Old Norse verbs have the ending -t in the 2nd person singular preterite indicative, while the West Germanic languages have -i. In this case, neither ending is clearly a retention or innovation. Mainstream linguists would tend to say that this is an example of independent choices made from a doublet existing in the proto-language. That is, Proto-Germanic may have allowed either -t or -i to be used as the ending, either in free variation or perhaps depending on dialects within Proto-Germanic or on the particular verb in question. Each of the three daughters independently standardized on one of the two endings, and by chance Gothic and Old Norse chose the same ending.

It must in any case be borne in mind that other isoglosses have led scholars to propose an early split between East and Northwest Germanic. Furthermore, features shared by any two branches of Germanic do not necessarily require the postulation of a proto-language excluding the third, as the early Germanic languages were all part of a dialect continuum in the early stages of their development and contact between the three branches of Germanic was extensive.

Examples

Notes

See also

• List of Germanic languages
• Germanic Languages - Comparison of Selected Terms for a chart comparing Gothic words to those of other Germanic languages
• Geats
• Gotlanders
• Old Gutnish
• Grimm's law
• Verner's law
• Grammar of the Gothic Language (book)
• Gothic alphabet

References

• Bennett, William Holmes (1980). An Introduction to the Gothic Language. New York: Modern Language Association of America. 
• W. Braune and E. Ebbinghaus, Gotische Grammatik, 17th edition 1966, Tübingen
  • 20th edition, 2004. ISBN 3-484-10852-5 (hbk), ISBN 3-484-10850-9 (pbk)
• Fausto Cercignani, 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.
• 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.
• W. Krause, Handbuch des Gotischen, 3rd edition, 1968, Munich.
• F. Mossé, Manuel de la langue gotique, Aubier Éditions Montaigne, 1942
• Skeat, Walter William (1868). A Moeso-Gothic glossary. London: Asher & Co.. 
• Wilhelm Streitberg, Die gotische Bibel , 4th edition, 1965, Heidelberg
• Joseph Wright, Grammar of the Gothic language, 2nd edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966
  • 2nd edition, 1981 reprint by Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-811185-1

External links

• Gotisch im WWW Portal for information on Gothic (in German)
• English-Gothic Dictionary (Also contains neologisms and reconstructed words)
• "Gothic dictionary with etymologies" by Andras Rajki
• Gothic lessons
• Germanic Lexicon Project - early (Public Domain) editions of several of the references.
• Texts:
  • The Gothic Bible in Latin alphabet
  • The Gothic Bible in Ulfilan script (Unicode text) from Wikisource
  • The Gothic Bible in Runic alphabet (Unicode text) from Wikisource
  • Titus has Streitberg's Gotische Bibel and Crimean Gothic material after Busbecq.
  • Wulfila Project
  • Skeireins Projet
  • Bagme Bloma, a Gothic poem by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Gothic for Travellers: Good conversation starters are death, torture, eating and drinking.
• Gothic Online from the University of Texas at Austin