[gothic-l] Old Gutnish

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Bertil wrote:

>A final question. For how long have you
>studied the Old Gutnish language?


>From the perusal of Francisc's excellent and very informative
analysis, it is clear to me that his methodolgy, viz. comparative
linguistics, is a feasible one. It is then, possible to use the
results obtained by others, because they have described
the characteristic features of each language in such a way
that comparison becomes possible from a general linguistic
point of view, which does not necessitate the ability to
speak or write the language in question.

To me, who operates on a much more elementary level, it is also
obvious that I do not need to "study" Old Gutnish for a certain
number of years in order to qualify myself. In fact, Old Gutnish
being very very similar to Old Norse (in the West Norse variant),
it is in fact, for me, sufficient to have a knowledge of Old Norse
in order to see that Old Gutnic is almost exactly the same - except
for some spelling variations, which may reflect some difference in
the pronounciation of some vowels.

But if I had had qualifications in General linguistics, and in particular
old Germanic languages, it is also clear that the problem can be
approached from a higher level, viz. from the level of comparative
Germanic linguistics. And the way I understand it, it is this which
Francisc has done. And the way I see it now, thanks to Francisc's
fine example of how such analysis may be performed, I now also see
that this is the only feasible method if one wants to obtain
quantitative results, and not only a "feeling" of "oh, yes, they
are close". (which is my level ;)

Of course other approaches are also possible, such as statistics
of vocabularies. But that method has its problems as well, since
the same letters do not always reflect the same sounds etc.
And if done by computer, how to tell the computer to extract the
correct roots or stems etc.

Another method might be to compare the morphologies.
e.g. of nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Best rergards
Keth




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