[gothic-l] Re: Old Gutnish

[dirk at SMRA.CO.UK]

--- In gothic-l at y..., "Francisc Czobor" <czobor at c...> wrote:
> Hi Bertil,
> 
> --- In gothic-l at y..., Bertil Häggman <mvk575b at t...> wrote:
> 
> > ...
> > Personally I believe after maybe
> > a decade of throrugh studies of the
> > whole corpus of Old Gutnish texts
> > any judgement can be made on
> > the relation between the two
> > languages.
> > 
> > Also I think Neogard's wordbook, which
> > contains a large number of words, which
> > he thought was related to Gothic. There are
> > about 2,000 manuscript to sift through.
> > 
> 
> Do you thing that one has to study the whole corpus of Gutnish texts 
> in order to have an idea about the character of the language?
> The language of Guta Saga and Gutalagh is for me clearly 
Scandinavic, 
> and it reminds me the language of the Old Icelandic texts, despite 
the 
> fact that one is East Scandinavic and the other West Scandinavic 
> (after all, both have a common source and were initially two 
dialects 
> of the same lanmguage, isn't it?).
> Do you think that the language of the other Gutnish texts is so 
> different from that of Gutasaga&Gutalagh so that it could change 
this 
> impression of Scandinavic character? This would imply that in 
Gotland 
> were spoken two totally different Germanic languages: a North 
Germanic 
> languages (reflected in Gutasaga&Gutalagh) and an East Germanic 
> (Gothic) language.
> 
> > A final question. For how long have you
> > studied the Old Gutnish language?
> > 
> 
> OK, I begun a very unsistematic study of Old Gutnish only some 2 
weeks 
> ago (in my virtually inexistent spare time). On the other hand, I 
> study the Gothic language since approx. 10 years, so that looking at 
> the Gutasaga&Gutalagh I saw clearly that their language is not 
Gothic, 
> but has an North Germanic character (I am somehow familiar with the 
> North Germanic languages, since I was long time interested in the 
> comparative study of the Germanic languages).
> 
> Francisc


Hi Francisc,

I have no reason to doubt your linguistic analysis. As I have no 
knowledge of linguistics myself I simply asked the expert, Prof. Bo 
Ralph of Goeteburg University. He confirmed your findings. He said: 
"However, Gutnish is not too different from other varieties of Nordic 
from the period, and although I remember that in the past it has been 
claimed that there may be some traits that are "East Germanic", that 
is, reminding of Gothic, it is clear that the similarities are not 
greater than those between Gothic and other Germanic languages of that 
period in general."

cheers,
Dirk






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