Toledo

[ualarauans]

Hi,

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "faltin2001" <d.faltin at ...> wrote:
>
> [...]
> Gothic may indeed never have existed as such, but they may just 
have
> been East Germanic, which we typically equate with Gothic. The
> Visigoths (I hope you know that Jordanes or Cassiodorus invented 
this
> name, or is that new to you as well?), lost their Germanic language
> during the 5th century, after having lived among Romans for some 5 
or
> more generations. The Ostrogoths may have stuck with Gothic a 
little
> longer. Theoderic never referes to Gothic, but he uses the 
term "our
> language". Yet, this "our language" had almost certainly very 
little in
> common with the Gothic of the Wulfila bible. Instead, it was 
probably a
> military pidgin with many Germanic, Latin and some Greek words.

et alibi

>> Just to clarify, there is really no doubt today that
>> the Visigoths who settled in Spain after 507 didn't speak Gothic, 
but
>> Latin or
>> better a Latin military pidgin that included Germanic terms. The 
fact
>> that all royal documents issued by Visigothic kings are in Latin 
shouldn't
>> surprise. The same is true for Italy. Yet, even in private and 
Arian
>> church documents there is no use and not even a reference to an 
other
>> language, let alone Gothic. In Italy at least some private and 
clerical
>> documents use Gothic, albeit in a static, archic and formulaic 
way that
>> shows that the language was more or less dead already in daily 
use.

There's the famous epigram from the Anthologia Latina representing 
Gothic as spoken in Italy in the 6. ct.: eils... scapia matzia ia 
drincan... This doesn't differ significantly from the language of 
the Bible translation. Normalized after the Wulfilan orthography the 
phrase would look: hails! skapjam matjan jah drigkan! ("Hail! Let's 
eat and drink!" – as you see that's no archaic formula but a phrase 
of a living language). This proves that the spoken Gothic language 
of the time of Theoderic (his "lingua nostra") was still close 
enough to that of the Bible, and not a mongrel jargon of Roman 
mercenaries as it seems to be argued in the citations above.

Ualarauans

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