Visigothic identity of Spain

[Ingemar Nordgren]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans at ...> wrote:
>
Hails Ualarauans!

Interesting thought but I am dubious in certain aspects. If they had
won the wars, yes they would have stayed in power and so had the Arian
church. The Gothic liturgical language may well have survived at least
with Germanic neophytes. Concerning non Germanic neophytes I think
there is a limit depending, as you say, on the small number Germanics
in contrary to the latin speaking. I think you must have established a
Latin liturgy as well and, in the long run, Gothic would still have
been a minor language but it probably would  have survived among the
Goths themselves to a certain degree and definitely in ecclesiastical
documents. What concerns legal documents and other more private
scriptures we might have had at least a feasible archive but probably
Latin would have been the normal for official documents. The Slavic
et.c. peoples you referred to earlier had the advantage that they all
had the same language and hence there was no danger of minorization in
their case.

Best wishes!
Iggwimer



> Hails Iggwimer!
> 
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Ingemar Nordgren <ingemar@> 
> wrote:
> >
> > <...>
> > 
> > ualarauans wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> Thanks for your kind reply. I think I must disavow my statement 
> above of a parallel between the Goths and the later Slavs. Both the 
> Catholic and the Orthodox Slavic nations developed original 
> cultures, they kept their languages and ethnic identities, whereas 
> both Arian Ostrogoths and converted Catholic Visigoths must have 
> undergone a significant, if not a complete, Romanization before they 
> fell victims of a foreign conquest. The main factors were probably 
> their relatively small number, the attraction of the Roman high 
> culture etc, which were pointed out on this list before.
> 
> It would be interesting to speculate upon an alternative scenario... 
> What if the Ostrogoths would have succeeded beating off the 
> Byzantines and establishing a Gotho-Italian state with the Arian 
> church as an official confession ("creed of the kings"), preserving 
> the Theodoric-style climate of tolerance towards the Catholic 
> majority and other groups? The Arian doctrine attracting more and 
> more non-Gothic neophytes, would it spread the Gothic language 
> liturgy also upon them? In which case Gothic wouldn't have died so 
> soon. Maybe it wouldn't have died at all?
> 
> Ualarauans
>





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