[gothic-l] Re: Critique wanted on Gothic pronunciation

[llama_nom]

Hails Matþaiu!


1) GOTHIC PRONUNCIATION

http://www.oe.eclipse.co.uk/nom/mark2.mp3

There´s my version of the passage Sean recorded, the beginning of 
Mark 2.  In spite of my intentions, a few of those short high vowels 
sound a bit lax to me after all, e.g. [sUns].  Oh well.  Sadly your 
recitation of Bagme Bloma is no longer working, though the text 
portions of your old site are still accessible.  It´s a while since 
I heard it, and I can´t remember now how /d/ and /b/ fared.  I 
wonder if we'll all reach a concensus, or continue speaking our 
different 'dialects'.

> For instance in Procopius: Ala'rikhos, Gise'likhos, Oui'ttigis,
> O'ptaris (-rin). The accent suggests the last two syllables are 
short

That's interesting.  A similar shortening is posited for -ric and 
other second elements of Old English names.  Is the first part of 
Gise'likhos supposed to be Got. *geisls?  And what would that say 
about our attempts to deduce Gothic phonetics from the placement of 
the Greek accent!?  What do we know about Greek epsilon at this 
time?  Oui'ttigis: maybe useful, but is the first element (in 
Wulfilan spelling) *weit- or *wit-?  I guess O'ptaris might indicate 
a less tense realisation of /u/.  Or maybe it owes more to the fact 
that Greek _ou_ would only exist in a longer variant in a stressed 
syllable, in comparison with the Gothic short /u/.  And is Procopius 
likely to be basing these on hearing the names spoken by Goths, in 
Gothic, or could he have heard them, at first or second hand, 
through the medium of Latin (still the lingua-franca of the 
Byzantine of the military?).  Ah, so many questions...


2) I-UMLAUT, A TORTUOUS PHILOLOGICAL INTERLUDE

> Perhaps you are right about i. I took my cues also from noting the
> apparently allophonic nature of short i or short e in early 
Germanic,
> perhaps this contributes to the ease toward i-mutation.

Good point, they must have been fairly close during the period when 
this change operated, but then I suppose that only gives us relative 
information.  Over the the expanses of time and space we're talking 
about, it's hard to make absolute distinctions so fine.  Wulfila's 
spelling suggests that, by his time at least, Gothic had a mid front 
vowel of some sort and a high front vowel of some sort that were 
quite distinct.  The sounds weren't confused by the scribes either.  
These are the two Gothic accents we have a clue about.  But for all 
we know other unattested Gothic dialects followed a quite different 
pattern.

Re. i-umlaut of /e/.  This is something that´s been puzzling me, 
probably because I'm a mere amateur and haven't seen enough up-to-
date scholarship, but in an article on Crimean Gothic, Ottar Grønvik 
(Die dialektgeographische Stellung des Krimgotischen und die 
krimgotische cantilena), i-umlaut of /e/ is listed among the 
defining features of NW Germanic.  But I'm not really sure how it's 
possible to reach this conclusion given the phonology of Wulfilan 
Gothic, and the lack of other reliable East Germanic evidence.  Any 
ideas?

Similarly with a-umlaut (central umlaut) of /u/.  Wright I think 
assumes that Gothic once shared these features with NWG, but later 
lost the distinction as the high and mid vowels fell together.  
Grønvik characterises both umlauts as innovations in NWG which never 
affected Gothic or its ancestor.  But how to be sure?  This latter 
change in particular is taken by Grønvik as one piece of evidence 
for a WG strand in the history of Crimean Gothic.


3) DIPHTHONGS

Regarding diphthongs, here are some comments I posted (less 
pseudonymously!) on Sean's site.  

http://penguin.pearson.swarthmore.edu/scrist1/cgi-
bin/gmc_message_board?command=showpost&id=whj2a9fb9224&sort=d



> It is also good to hear
> different interpretations, almost like different "accents", perhaps
> similar to how Latin was regionalized by various languages' 
influence.

Yes, that would explain it: we´re just Goths from different 
regions.  There must have been far more variety than we'll ever know 
about.

Llama Nom





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