Wanna share your ambitions and intenstions?

[llama_nom]

I have an ambition to work out some basic things about Gothic word 
order, which isn't so easy, because Gothic Bible is in most ways a 
word for word translation from the Greek, so you have to look out 
for those specific ways in which it differs.  It's also complicated 
by the fact that the exact text of the Greek original that it was 
based on is not known.  Wilhelm Streitberg printed a reconstructed 
version of the Greek, which appears at the Wulfila Project site and 
at TITUS, but very often other Greek versions offer a better match 
for the Gothic, so these have to be ckecked too.  Useful are regular 
deviations, such as 'iþ' almost always being placed first in the 
clause, in contrast to Greek DE, which comes second.  Likewise 
Go. 'unte' for Gk. GAR.  Also where Gothic needs two or more words 
to translate a single Greek word, although even here you have to be 
careful because given half a chance the Gothic will imitate the 
order of morphemes in the Greek word!  Occasional and arbitrary 
differences are always suspect, especially where they can be 
paralleled elsewhere in the Greek.  Modern researchers are sometimes 
a bit erratic about this, but really you have to be strict in what 
evidence is allowed, otherwise there's no way of establishing what 
is a genuine Gothic usage, and what is really a feature of Greek 
syntax.

It's fiddly and time-consuming work, and short of more texts being 
discovered, there'll always be mysteries.  But the payoff is a 
glimpse into the syntax of an early Germanic language, in some ways 
like its later kin, in other ways intriguingly different.  I'd also 
like to learn more about syntactical theory, because this could 
offer a way of deducing generalised rules from the scant evidence.  
But it's important to establish what that evidence is first before 
resorting to theory.

This had impications for anyone who wants to write or speak in a 
reconstructed Gothic.  I think it would be good to establish all 
that can be established about the historical language, otherwise any 
reconstruction would tend to take the form of people expressing 
their thoughts in modern ways but just using Gothic words, whereas a 
language is more than just vocabulary.  But then any living laguage 
is going to develop in its own way in any case, so maybe this 
wouldn't seem so important to other people.

I also have a Secret Plan to write something on pronunciation.  
Having read (and ranted at!) the rather chaotic and contradictory 
Wikipedia entry a couple of months back, and then this new Gothic 
Online Course, I've finally been galled into starting a file on the 
matter.  That could take ages too, but I'm concentrating to begin 
with on the thorny issue of <ai> and <au>.  Again, a lot of problems 
will never be solved, but I reckon I can narrow down the 
possibilities a bit with logic.  For example, some scolars have 
suggested that each digraph stood for a single phoneme, but the loss 
of final inflectional -s only after a short syllable implies that 
<ai> and <au> probably had both short and long variants.  Loanwords 
and the spelling of personal names in Latin and Greek texts suggests 
that the old Germanic diphthings were preserved well after Wulfila's 
time in some dialects, but lost in others, though it may not be 
possible to make a simple division between "Visigoths" 
and "Ostrogoths" on this point.




--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Fredrik" <gadrauhts at ...> wrote:
>
> Hi!
> 
> I guess everyone here have some intentions and reasons why you 
wanna 
> learn gothic. One could be a general interest in languages and 
> specially in gothic, but why is that?
> 
> Different from other languages like english, german and spanish 
which 
> people learn (mostly) because it could be useful in their work. 
> Gothic is not that useful, coz nobody uses it.
> 
> So why do you wanna learn it/did you learn it?
> Was it maybe because you wanna know how to speak it, of some 
reason 
> or was it coz you wanna understand germanic hostory more??
> 
> Myself I have changed my reasons during the time. First of all I 
have 
> a interest in languages and especially in germanic ones. When I 
> first, long ago, found out that there was a third branch of the 
> germanic family, the eastern this become my main interest, so I 
began 
> to study it as much as possible. First just to learn a little 
about 
> it and see what this east germanic branch was like, and what was 
> different between this and the west and noth germanic branches.
> 
> Later I got a book with some basic grammar, a tiny dictionary and 
> some text samples from the bible. Since that time I have been 
trying 
> to learn gothic. Mostly when it comes to understanding those texts.
> It's kinda hard to learn speaking it when it lacks so much 
(attested) 
> words.
> 
> Do you also wanna share your ambitions and dreams/thoughts?
> 
> Mine is to learn to speak gothic fluently and with a much better 
> pronunciation then I have now. (It's still a long way to go...my 
> grammar kinda sucks for now). This means that my vocabulary has to 
> expand but also that the total gothic vocabulary has to that too. 
> That's why I'm tryin to collect neologisms in a dictionary. My 
> present goal is to reach 30 000 words, which is the average number 
of 
> words is a pocket dictionary.
> I don't think it's total necessary that all these neologisms is 
> standard for all gothic speakers, if some one like to use other 
words 
> I think thats OK. For example we can say that I prefer a puristic 
> vocabulary so a word like republic should be thiudawaihts, but if 
> some one like raí°µbleik (to remind of other germanic languages) or 
> smth like that...go for it.
> 
> My dreams and (utopic) thought is that I should be able to use it 
in 
> daily speech. For that I probably need some one or two in my life 
> that also know how to speak it, (and that's not like it today).
> 
> I think it would be interesting to know a little about you and 
what's 
> on your mind about all this...so plz share your thought.
> 
> /Fredrik
>






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