Hello there! Hails, a Gothic reviver with information about a revival project

Tue Apr 15 20:49:12 UTC 2014

Hello there, 

 My name here is Lingua and I 'm from the Netherlands. I recently discussed with somebody at skype about reviving languages and we were thinking what would be a good language to revive, Gothic of all of them actually has the most potential because there is a lot of vocabulary transfered to us and there is a lot of demand for the language. The language also has enough places to revive it, although the Goths as such don't exist anymore, their descendants still exist in places like Spain, Germany, South-Sweden, Italy, because they have been in all these places and there will definitely be some DNA left, it's fore sure though that some people identify themselves with the Goths, there are even Goths which want to learn Gothic, because the name of their subculture has it's origin a bit far away from these people, and it sounds cool to them. :P

 Anyway, I also got a big interest in the language itself while I was researching it, and it's remarkable how some words in this language are not similar anymore in English, German and Swedish, but in my native language Dutch and in the one of the Frisians, Frisian, some words are astonishingly similar. Like a very basic word: "ik". It's exactly the same in Dutch: "ik", English changed it in "I", while they used "ic" in the past, but they removed a letter, and the Germans shifted it to a "kh" sound which is written as: "ich", in Scandinavia it changed to something completely different: "jeg" (Norwegian), but we kept this word. Some other words which are similar which I see are:
 "auk", which is "ook" in Dutch and "too" in English. "witan", which is "weten" in Dutch and became "wissen" in German and "to know" in English. Of course there are also enough words which aren't similar at all. :P

 I 'm right now building a website to help reviving this language. It's still under construction, so I can't share the link yet because there are still broken link now, functions which don't work and bad security. I can keep updates about it if you want.

 My intention is to create a user-community and a user-friendly approach to learning Gothic, this means that the simple course for Gothic which I 'm currently making at my website is written like a language course for German or Italian, it contains short texts, vocabulary and simple-explained grammar, not in an academic way. I also added the option to add your own speaker group, this means that I have a page where you can see in what places people can come together to speak Gothic. In order to revive a language, it needs to be spoken. But a very reasonable thing which people say about Gothic is: where will I use this? Well, this is the same problem as Irish Gaelic and Welsh in some places: It actually IS spoken, but some people just don't want to speak it although they have learned it, because they don't know if other people want it. This is why there are some Welsh speaking groups in cafés/public houses. I was inspired by this idea and used it for Gothic, users which register at my website can add speaker groups so that you can see where you can actually use Gothic with other like-minded people. You can also add chatrooms where people can speak Gothic.

 Another thing which I will add are tests, you can do some tests and if you finish them the "proficiency" of Gothic in your profile will change from, for example "beginner" to "beginner B", which is higher. I also made a small tool with which you can practice Gothic words by giving the right translation for random Gothic words which are displayed. In other stuff, all kinds of stuff.

 You can also upload texts in Gothic and I have added an option to let the website automatically translate certain words in texts, to have a faster learning progress.
 The most important thing is the forum which I will build, but it is really in a starting phase right now.

 Thanks for reading!
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