Wanna share your ambitions and intenstions?

[thiudans]

Hails!

Thought I would bring back a piece of history (as I was perusing the
archives). I wonder how you are doing on these goals, not as a matter
of control, but purely because I am interested in the results of these
efforts!

Cheers,
Th.

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> 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@> 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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