Toledo

[frederick_s_74110]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans at ...> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> 
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "faltin2001" <d.faltin@> wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> > Gothic may indeed never have existed as such, but they may just 
> have
> > been East Germanic, which we typically equate with Gothic. The
> > Visigoths (I hope you know that Jordanes or Cassiodorus invented 
> this
> > name, or is that new to you as well?), lost their Germanic language
> > during the 5th century, after having lived among Romans for some 5 
> or
> > more generations. The Ostrogoths may have stuck with Gothic a 
> little
> > longer. Theoderic never referes to Gothic, but he uses the 
> term "our
> > language". Yet, this "our language" had almost certainly very 
> little in
> > common with the Gothic of the Wulfila bible. Instead, it was 
> probably a
> > military pidgin with many Germanic, Latin and some Greek words.
> 
> et alibi
> 
> >> Just to clarify, there is really no doubt today that
> >> the Visigoths who settled in Spain after 507 didn't speak Gothic, 
> but
> >> Latin or
> >> better a Latin military pidgin that included Germanic terms. The 
> fact
> >> that all royal documents issued by Visigothic kings are in Latin 
> shouldn't
> >> surprise. The same is true for Italy. Yet, even in private and 
> Arian
> >> church documents there is no use and not even a reference to an 
> other
> >> language, let alone Gothic. In Italy at least some private and 
> clerical
> >> documents use Gothic, albeit in a static, archic and formulaic 
> way that
> >> shows that the language was more or less dead already in daily 
> use.
> 
> There's the famous epigram from the Anthologia Latina representing 
> Gothic as spoken in Italy in the 6. ct.: eils... scapia matzia ia 
> drincan... This doesn't differ significantly from the language of 
> the Bible translation. Normalized after the Wulfilan orthography the 
> phrase would look: hails! skapjam matjan jah drigkan! ("Hail! Let's 
> eat and drink!" – as you see that's no archaic formula but a phrase 
> of a living language). This proves that the spoken Gothic language 
> of the time of Theoderic (his "lingua nostra") was still close 
> enough to that of the Bible, and not a mongrel jargon of Roman 
> mercenaries as it seems to be argued in the citations above.
> 
> Ualarauans
>
I never thought of the Goths and Visigoths as mercenaries but as
auxillaries but I guess this is begging the issue! As to godzilla
versus godzira...remember that those who win in combat write the
history..right or wrong. This is the last law of the bushido..Might
this be the very issue that we face in the case of the Spanish
Visigoths or perhaps their language became part of Catalan.

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