crimean gothic

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Fredrik" <gadrauhts at ...> wrote:
>
> Doesn't it seem to be as crimean gothic differences from biblical 
> also appears in later visi- and ostrogothic as they were spoken in 
> italy and spain. Such as e: to i:, o: to u: etc?

Yes, these two sound changes are found in Gothic personal names
recorded by writers of Latin and Greek, and seem to have been a
feature of spoken Gothic in Italy at the time when the surviving
manuscripts were produced.  The scribal confusion of `e' with `ei',
and `o' with `u' affects some parts of the Gothic Bible more than
others; the surviving texts are apparently based on earlier versions
in which this confusion didn't exist.

> The fact that CG has e as in schwester where biblical has i isn't 
> that just a difference that developed as a dialectal form in perhaps 
> visigothic?

It might be that the loss of distinction between PGmc. /i/ and /e/
wasn't a feature of all Gothic dialects.  Or it might be that Busbeque
used `e' in some of these words because he assimilated them to West
Germanic cognates that were familiar to him.  Alternatively, `i' could
have been lowered to `e' later in the history of Crimean Gothic in
some contexts at least.  I don't think there's enough evidence to be sure.

> if CG have similarities with WG in grammar rather than with Biblical 
> gothic, isn't that perhaps because Bibilical gothic has a major greek 
> influence and the spoken language probably was more germanic than the 
> written and thus more similar to WG than the written biblical gothic?

One grammatical difference that Grønvik refers to here is
morphological: the use of the pronominal ending in feminine dative
singular adjectives (dorbize).  There is no evidence, as far as I
know, that the Greek source influenced the morphology (variable word
forms, inflections) of the Gothic translation, although it did have a
big influence on word order.  But the identification of this word is
highly speculative, so it's not at all clear whether Grønvik's
conclusion is correct.  If it was a comparative or something else
entirely (which it could well be), his argument wouldn't hold.

> > 4) Raising of e > i before u/w irregular (seuene, fyder), but so too
> > in other dialects.
> 
> Would some exlain this to me.
> Should e have risen to i in seuene? Is the u in seuene a way of 
> writing v or w?

The potential cause of the raising that Grønvik is talking about here
is no longer evident in the Crimean Gothic forms, but still present in
Biblical Gothic: [u] in the case of `sibun', and [w] in the case of
`fidwor'.  And yes, the `u' in `seuene' could represent [v] or [w].

> about fyder: if e has been raised to i, then y is just another way of 
> spelling i. But couldn't this be a u-umlaut?
> fidwor > fyder.

Maybe.  One thing that suggests that Busbeque might have used `y'
interchangeably with `i' is that it also appears in `mycha' (Biblical
Gothic `meikeis'), where there was no following [u] or [w] in earlier
stages of the language.

> OPr maybe it raised from fedwor to fidwor and then u-umlauted to 
> fyder with weakened o to e.

I guess you meant OCr (Old Crimean)?  That seems a reasonable
possibility to me.  Either of these could have happened:

[e] > [i]
[e] > [i] > [y]

And even if the latter had happened, it could have been unrounded later.

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