Subject: LL-L: "Gothic" [E] LOWLANDS-L, 19.JUN.1999 (05)

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at geocities.com>
Subject: Gothic

Ethan Barrett wrote:

> 1.    Is Old Gothic considered a lowland language, or is it a dialect of
> Alt Hoch Deutsch?  I know that it is extinct, but I am interested in
> learning more about it for etymological/historical purposes.

Ethan, Gothic belongs to Eastern Germanic, an entirely different branch of the
Germanic language group.  It thus has no direct connection with German.  German
is variously classified as West Germanic or South Germanic (and the English
equivalent of _Althochdeutsch_ is "Old High German," by the way).

Gothic is the best known representative of this now extinct East Germanic
branch.  There are
reports of a remnant of it still having been used in the eighteenth or
nineteenth century in the Black Sea area, which is roughly the traditional
homeland of Gothic, though oral history and recent scholarship seem to point to
Southern Sweden's Gotland region as the origin of the Gothic people.

I do understand your confusion.  German books dealing with the German language
oftentimes lead the novice reader astray: they refer to Gothic as the oldest
documented Germanic language and make it seem as though it is an ancestor of
German (and as though Low Saxon (Low German) belongs to German).

I recommend the following book:

Robinson, Orrin W., _Old English and It's Closest Relatives: A survey of the
earliest Germanic languages_; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992; ISBN
0-8047-2221-8 (paperback).

Of course I have a problem with the subtitle.  I would prefer it if it said "A
survey of the earliest written languages," since I am sure the ones we know are
not the earliest forms, just the earliest *written* forms we know of, and we
don't know anything about spoken varieties at the time and prior to it.

Here on Lowlands-L we focus on what we know as "Lowlands languages," which does
not include German, the Nordic languages and Gothic, though we may discuss them
within Lowlandic contexts.

I hope this helped.

Regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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