Reconstructing Gothic

[Edmund Fairfax edmundfairfax@yahoo.ca [gothic-l]]

I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but it should be noted that reconstructing non-attested lexical items requires a solid background in early-Germanic historical linguistics, and even then the task is fraught with great uncertainty. Reconstruction is -- if scientific -- based on the comparative method, that is, by comparing early-Germanic reflexes or cognates in other Indo-European branches and then working backwards (or sideways) based on extrapolated regular phonological correspondences. However, it is impossible to predict changes in meaning or outright lexical replacement. To give a single example, imagine that we did not know the word for 'mother' in Gothic. Based on the Old English, Old Norse, Old High German and Old Saxon words for 'mother', one would expect a Gothic form *modar, yet the extant word is in fact aithei; the former word was evidently lost and replaced by the latter. Not all change in a language, moreover, is regular; Modern
 English 'one', for example, should be pronounced so as to rhyme with 'stone' (the words 'only' and 'atone' preserve the regular or predicted outcome, from respectively 'one+ly' and 'at one'). Analogical change may also add considerable uncertainty: de-Vernerization in Gothic, for instance, is not regular.

The total number of extant Gothic words is not much more than a thousand, if my memory serves me correctly, but the active vocabulary of an average person is around three thousand items, and passive knowledge might see a rise to around thirty thousand in the case of a very literate individual. Thus, any attempt to write in Gothic will be severely hampered by the lack of surviving words. Attempts to reconstruct thousands of needed words would result in more of an invented language that a real one, and in that case, one might as well start from scratch, as did Tolkien, with his Sindarin, etc.

The basic errors on the Gothic language website in progress, a link to which was included in a communication a couple of weeks ago, does not inspire confidence that the results will be reliable and really useful, and forgive my bluntness in saying so. If the goal is to be able to write in an existing ancient language, rather than merely a fictional one based on a small corpus of existing words, then the much better understood and better recorded languages of Classical Latin or Ancient Greek, or even Old English or Old Norse, would be far friendlier mediums.

Edmund


On Sunday, May 25, 2014 6:17:05 AM, "d.faltin at hispeed.ch [gothic-l]" <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
 


  
Some members have expressed the ambition to reconstruct or extrapolate Gothic. There is a new book by the German linguist Wolfram Euler called Westgermanisch (West Germanic), where Euler has reconstructed Langobardic from Old High German. Both languages are West Germanic and very closely related. However, I guess using the proper rules it would be possible to extrapolate Gothic into a fully fledged language.

Here is a video of a guy reading the Old High German Hildebrandslied in original and in the reconstructed Langobardic. I think this reconstructed Langobardic is also pretty close to Gothic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kpRFU7YKY8


Cheers,
Dirk
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20140525/ad4de561/attachment.htm>