[gothic-l] vowel table; Re: Reidgotaland

[Francisc Czobor]

Hi Keth,

This is the third tentative to reply to your message of yesterday.

--- In gothic-l at y..., keth at o... wrote:
> ...
> Apropos of GUTANI : Do you believe it is related to the participle?
> I assume it is a genitive form. Was the nominative form "gutans"?
> And is that a plural or a singular?
>

"GUTANI WIHAILAG" is the most commonly accepted reading of the runic
inscription on the golden necklace of the Visigothic treasure of
Pietroasa, Romania (4th century). The (again) most commonly accepted
interpretation is "of the Goths sacred-holy [property]" (corresponding
to a Wulfilan *Gutane weih-hailag*). Thus GUTANI or *Gutane is the
genitive plural of a weak masculine declension, the nominative form
being sg. *Guta "Goth", pl. *Gutans "Goths".

> ...
> And as you see, I added some more entries as an afterthought.
> It now becomes, I think, more of an undcided question,
> which Germanic language Gothic is the most related to.

Well, since Gothic is an East Germanic language, and the other
languages of your comparative table are West or North Germanic, one
could say that Gothic is related with all in general and with none
specially. In fact, Gothic has some phonetic inovations in common with
North Germanic, but they do not appear in your examples.
On the other hand, you should not forget that Gothic is attested some
centuries earlier than the other Germanic languages. For this reason,
it looks more archaical, closer to Common Germanic. In this case, if
you are looking for phonetic similarities with Gothic, you will find
them where a certain language is more conservative. So, for instance,
if you look at the vowels, you will find that OHG (and even modern
German) is closest to Gothic. But if you look at the consonants, you
will see that Old English is much closer to Gothic than OHG.

Francisc


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