Gothic compared to other Germanic languages

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, mike r <raging_viking at y...> wrote:
>
> Greetings!
> 
>  Someone told me that Gothic is the hardest Germanic
> language to learn and that after I learn this one
> everything will be "downhill" should I choose to learn
> more germanic languages. Is this true?


Greetings Mike,

I think my answer would be: "In some ways yes, in most ways no."  
The fact that so little written Gothic has survived makes it 
relatively easy to learn all the vocabulary that's known.  Gerhard 
Köbler in the preface to his dictionary says that he has only 3300 
entries for words recorded in the language of the Gothic bible (of 
which some 8-9% has survived).  In all he has 5500 entries, 
including hypothetical words whose existence is implied by the 17th 
Crimean Gothic wordlist, the letter names of the Vienna-Salzburg 
manuscript, and Germanic loanwords in Spanish, Italian, Romanian, 
Russian, etc.  But the limited nature of the corpus means that even 
if you know more about Gothic than anyone else alive, you still 
won't know a lot of Gothic!  There will always be uncertainties.  
For example the gender and declension of some words is unknown.  
East Germanic broke away from the ancestor of the other Germanic 
languages at an early stage, and it shows some peculiarities of its 
own.  Some features common to all of the other Germanic languages 
are lacking in Gothic.  You won't have a comprehensive picture of 
all the curiosities that lie in wait when studying Germanic 
languages.  On the other hand, you will have an interesting and in 
some ways revealing perspective.

I've found that familiarity with the Gothic inflections makes it 
easier to remember the inflections of Old Norse and Old English.  
Sometimes knowing the Gothic form clarifies things, or shown you the 
reason for things, in these languages which are puzzling at first 
sight.  The more archaic forms preserved in Gothic make the system 
more "transparent" in some instances, whereas these other languages 
may have a few forms that confusingly look the same but were 
originally different.

The Gothic inflectional system also seems a bit more regular in 
comparison to some of its relations, although this is partly due to 
the more extensive evidence for North & West Germanic dialects and 
time periods.  In one way it might be a bit like coming downhill, in 
that you get a panoramic view, but you still have lots of hard work 
to do to explore that landscape in detail.  Entertaining though...

Llama Nom





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