Visigothic identity of Spain

[Michael Erwin]

I've wondered for some time what the liturgical language of the  
Crimean Goths was. IIRC, their ecclesiastical autonomy within  
Constantinople lasted until 1797, though Greek may have predominated  
later on; within 14 centuries they should have left something, which  
would add to our understanding of the Gothic language.

On Oct 22, 2006, at 3:51 AM, ualarauans wrote:
>
> Using ethnic languages and ad hoc constructed alphabets for the
> purposes of evangelization outside the imperial borders was a
> characteristic feature of the East (Orthodox) Church throughout its
> history. As a consequence we've got a number of distinctive writing
> traditions within the sphere of the Byzantine cultural influence,
> some of which are still alive and in use nowadays. Copts, Armenians,
> Georgians, Slavs – all they received the Scriptures written in their
> own languages with their own alphabets from the hands of their
> apostles being either Byzantines or half-Byzantines (St. Cyril of
> the Slavs) or Greek-educated natives (St. Mesrop Mashtots of the
> Armenians). Wulfila and the Goths fit perfectly in with this list.
> No matter that they were not Orthodox (the Crimean Goths were).
> Monophysite Armenians aren't either. They all represent the East-
> Christian tradition of polyglossia as distinguished from the Western
> Catholic tradition of Romanization with Latin as the only
> permissible liturgical language. A written Coptic text looks much
> like Gothic visually; names of some letters in the Georgian alphabet
> sound close to those recorded for Late Gothic by Alcuin ([l] Georg.
> las - LGo. laaz; [m] Georg. man - LGo. manna); the start letter for
> [a] in Old Cyrillic was called azu – cf. aza in Alcuin's. Maybe
> these and other similarities are more than pure coincidences.
> Whatever they be, there was a quite different technical approach to
> the problem of conversion of the Barbarians in the East than in the
> West. Thanks to the Byzantine practice of translating the Bible into
> the ethnic languages we have now our knowledge of Gothic.
>
> The impact of a liturgy in the native language was indeed different
> from one in Latin. Typologically, we probably may compare historic
> fortunes of Slavic nations – Orthodox and Catholic respectively – to
> figure out hypothetical chances for Goths - staying Arian or
> converted to Catholicism - to survive and preserve their ethnicity.
>
> Ualarauans


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