History of the Gothic Language

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Tim Caldwell" <vikingtimbo650 at ...>
wrote:
>

> Is the gothic language archaic only because it's attested earlier 
> than other germanic languages, or could there be other reasons as 
> well? If texts written in other contemporary germanic languages from 
> western Germany and Scandinavia were to be discovered, would we 
> expect the languages they were written in to be just as archaic?

Hi Tim,

In some ways, the precursors of the attested North and West Germanic
languages would actually have been more archaic than Gothic was in the
4th and 5th centuries! A nice illustration of this is the Gallehus
Horn inscription: ek Hlewagastiz holtijaz horna tawidô, which Nielsen
reconstructed in Gothic as: ik Hliugasts hulteis haurn tawida.

(In the following, AN = Ancient Nordic, the language of the earliest
Scandinavian inscriptions, called by some Proto-Norse, Proto-Nordic or
Old Runic, etc.; NWG = Northwest Germanic, NG = North Germanic; WG =
West Germanic; Go. = Gothic; ON = Old Norse; OE = Old English; OS =
Old Saxon; OHG = Old High German.)

1. Words in Proto-Germanic consisted of a root, so for example *stadiz
"place" can be analysed as stad- + a stem vowel -i- + a grammatical
ending -z.  Gothic had already lost the stem vowels in certain endings
which are preserved in some later WG languages, and would have still
existed in NG at the time of the Gothic Bible, for example in the
nominative singular of masculine i-stems with a short root: Go. staþs,
OE stede, OS stedi, OHG stat, ON staðr, AN *stadiz.  Runic
inscriptions of the 4th and 5th centuries from NWG areas show stem
vowels also in types of word from which they had dissappeared by the
time that the descendant dialects were attested in manuscripts: AN
gastiz : Go. gasts; AN stainaz : Go. stains; AN hlaiwa : Go. hlaiw; AN
horna : Go. haurn.

2. Biblical Gothic had lost the distinction between Germanic *i and *e
which is preserved in later NWG languages.  Also the distinction
between Germanic *u and *o, if the Proto-Germanic dialect from which
Gothic descended ever made this distinction.  I don't know if it did.
 Old Gutnish, the variety of Old Norse spoken on Gotland, also doesn't
make this distinction, and like Gothic regularly has `o' before `r',
but `u' in other positions.  On the other hand, there is some (very
tenuous!) evidence of the distinction being preserved in Crimean
Gothic, especially in the word `schuos', a misprint for *schnos?  `o'
appears in some other Crimean Gothic words where it does in NWG, but
this one could be significant because it wasn't among those recognised
as Germanic by Busbeque.

3. Gothic lost the distinction between Proto-Germanic final unstressed
*ô and *ôn, which both became `a'.  In North Germanic final unstressed
*ô became `u' and final unstressed *ôn became `ô'.  Thus in the
nominative singular: Go. rûna : AN *rûnu (cf. `liubu' on the Opedal
stone) : OE rûn; versus the accusative singular: Go. rûna : AN rûnô :
OE rûne.

4. In Gothic, Proto-Germanic unstressed final *ê2 fell together with
*ôn as Go. `a'.  Because of this, Gothic lost the distinction between
the 1st and 2nd person singular past indicative endings of weak verbs
(the kind that form their past tense by adding a dental ending).  Thus
we find forms like AN `fa(i)hidô' "I painted" (ON fáða) and AN
`fa(i)hidê' "he or she painted" (ON fáði), but Go. `melida' "I wrote"
= Go. `melida' "he/she wrote".

5. Gothic had lost the final *z in the dative plural.  This is
preserved in the 7th c. Stentoften stone runic inscription, which has
the dative plural ending -umz, and even survives in a limited way in
Modern Icelandic in variants of the dative of the numerals 2 (tveimur)
and 3 (þremur). In the WG area, the dative plural is attested in some
Latin inscriptions dedicated to goddesses: Aflims (besides the Latin
dative Afliabus), Vatvims (besides Latin Vatviabus), but had may have
disappeared in WG by the time that Gothic is attested. The exact date
of the loss of final -z in WG is uncertain, as far as I know.

6. Gothic devoiced final fricatives in a way that hadn't happened in NWG.

7. Gothic removed many traces of the operation of Verner's Law by
paradigmatic analogy, especially in the past tense strong verbs and
causative verbs of the 1st weak conjugation.

8. Later attested WG dialects preserve the instrumental case much more
extensively than Gothic does.  In Gothic, only a couple of pronouns
survive of the old instrumental.  Like Old Norse, Gothic used the
dative in place of the instrumental.

9. On the other hand, WG had some early innovations such as gemination
(doubling) of consonants before [j], attested in the Weser runes, c.
400 (kunni), and the precise dating of other innovations in NG is
unclear...

10. SHARED ARCHAISMS. The NWG dialects of Wulfila's time were either
yet to experience the various changes known as i-mutation or i-umlaut,
or at least the results had yet to show up in inscriptions and
certainly wouldn't have been phonemically distinct (i.e. unpredicable
from neighbouring sounds). NWG dialects of Wulfila's time, like
Gothic, would still make a phonemic distinction between the reflexes
of Proto-Germanic *z and *r. No doubt there were lots of other shared
archaisms for which the evidence is lacking.

Llama Nom

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