Visigothic identity of Spain

[ualarauans]

Hi Tom,

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, macmaster at ... wrote:
>
> Language of liturgy and scripture surely had some impact in 
distinguishing
> ethnies ... an Arian service in Gothic with bible readings in 
Gothic
> clearly had a different impact than a Catholic service in Vulgar 
Latin

Using ethnic languages and ad hoc constructed alphabets for the 
purposes of evangelization outside the imperial borders was a 
characteristic feature of the East (Orthodox) Church throughout its 
history. As a consequence we've got a number of distinctive writing 
traditions within the sphere of the Byzantine cultural influence, 
some of which are still alive and in use nowadays. Copts, Armenians, 
Georgians, Slavs – all they received the Scriptures written in their 
own languages with their own alphabets from the hands of their 
apostles being either Byzantines or half-Byzantines (St. Cyril of 
the Slavs) or Greek-educated natives (St. Mesrop Mashtots of the 
Armenians). Wulfila and the Goths fit perfectly in with this list. 
No matter that they were not Orthodox (the Crimean Goths were). 
Monophysite Armenians aren't either. They all represent the East-
Christian tradition of polyglossia as distinguished from the Western 
Catholic tradition of Romanization with Latin as the only 
permissible liturgical language. A written Coptic text looks much 
like Gothic visually; names of some letters in the Georgian alphabet 
sound close to those recorded for Late Gothic by Alcuin ([l] Georg. 
las - LGo. laaz; [m] Georg. man - LGo. manna); the start letter for 
[a] in Old Cyrillic was called azu – cf. aza in Alcuin's. Maybe 
these and other similarities are more than pure coincidences. 
Whatever they be, there was a quite different technical approach to 
the problem of conversion of the Barbarians in the East than in the 
West. Thanks to the Byzantine practice of translating the Bible into 
the ethnic languages we have now our knowledge of Gothic.

The impact of a liturgy in the native language was indeed different 
from one in Latin. Typologically, we probably may compare historic 
fortunes of Slavic nations – Orthodox and Catholic respectively – to 
figure out hypothetical chances for Goths - staying Arian or 
converted to Catholicism - to survive and preserve their ethnicity.

Ualarauans




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