GOTHIC

LANGUAGE AND
ALPHABET
 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 sizable
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 languages such as Portuguese,
Spanish, and French.
 The expansion of the
Germanic tribes
 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 to
Catholicism in 589).
HISTORY AND EVIDENCE
 Only a few documents in Gothic survive, not enough to completely
reconstruct 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:
 Codex Argenteus (Uppsala), including the Speyer fragment: 188 leaves
 Codex Ambrosianus (Milan) and the Codex Taurinensis (Turin): Five parts,
totaling 193 leaves
 Codex Gissensis (Gießen): One leaf with fragments of Luke 23–24
 Codex Carolinus (Wolfenbüttel): Four leaves, fragments of Romans 11–15
 Gothica Bononiensia (also known as the Codex Bononiensis)
 Influence
 The reconstructed Proto-Slavic language
features several apparent borrowed words
from East Germanic (presumably Gothic),
such as *xlěbъ, "bread", vs. Gothic hlaifs.[22]
 The Romance languages of Iberia 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”).
 GOTHIC ALPHABET
 Gothic was originally written with a Runic
alphabet about which little is known. One
theory of the origins of Runes is that they
were invented by the Goths, but this is
impossible to prove as very few inscriptions
of writing in Gothic runes survive.
 The Gothic alphabet was invented around
middle the 4th century AD by Bishop Wulfila
(311-383 AD), the religious leader of the
Visigoths, to provide his people with a
written language and a means of reading his
translation of the Bible. It is based on the
Greek alphabet, with some extra letters from
the Latin and Runic alphabets.
 Diacritics and punctuation
 Diacritics and punctuation used in the Codex Argenteus include a trema
placed on 𐌹 i, transliterated as ï, in general applied to express diaeresis, the
interpunct (·) and colon (:) as well as overlines to indicate sigla (such as xaus
for xristaus) and numerals.
 Letters
Below is a table of the Gothic
alphabet.

Two letters used in its

transliteration are not used
in current English: thorn þ
(representing /θ/), and hwair
ƕ (representing /hʷ/).
As with the Greek alphabet,
Gothic letters were also
assigned numerical values.
When used as numerals,
letters were written either
between two dots (•𐌹𐌱• = 12)
or with an overline (𐌹𐌱 = 12).
Sample text in Gothic (The
Lord's Prayer)
What are the four classification of
Gothic letters?
 In the Type Index of that volume the gothic types are grouped as follows : (a)
Square Church Types =» Textur ; (b) Rounded Church and Heading Types =
Rotunda ; (c) Latin Text Types = small Rotundas, and (d) Vernacular German
Types = Bastardas.