Reconstructing Gothic

[roellingua@gmail.com [gothic-l]]

Hello Edmund, 

 Although Gothic hasn't a very big vocabulary, we know that a lot of Gothic words are quite similar to Old English and other old Germanic languages. Of course we can't know which words they exactly used, but there is one problem with your whole argument.
 

 The Hebrew language was revived by Elizer Ben Yahuda and he simply used the very limited amount of words from the Torah and words from among certain languages several Semitic languages like Assyrian and Arabic. Why did he do this? Because the words from those languages were most likely the words which would have been still used in a modern version of Hebrew. His intentions worked however, look at Israel, the whole country can speak Hebrew. An old language which is brought back by also using words from other languages within the same language group. If the language we were talking about was old Basque and there was no modern Basque, or Etruscan, we really had a problem, because there are no existing remnants of these languages. It is likely that languages like the Inuit languages are far related to Basque by a prehistoric ancestor, but even if this is so it is impossible with a time span of 5000 years to reconstruct words based on language families which have become completely different languages or language families.
 

 

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