Reconstructing Gothic

Tue May 27 22:49:31 UTC 2014

Let me add to Marja's comments the reference  D. H. Green, 'Language and Culture in early Germanic society' (Cambridge University Press, 1998) which sorts out a lot of the evidence for interconnectedness among the "branches" of Germanic, including Gothic.  Bottom line, he recognizes some words (e.g. aithei, "Eide";  Bavarian dialectal 'Pherintag') as suggesting some contact/borrowing between Gothic language and southeastern dialect areas of Old High German, which makes sense from a geographical perspective.  (Sorry can't give page numbers - typing from memory...)

Green's book is 400 pages of dense linguistic data, but it is worth the effort!

________________________________
 From: "Marja Erwin marja-e at riseup.net [gothic-l]" <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com>
To: gothic-l at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2014 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: [gothic-l] Reconstructing Gothic

Hmmm…

As far as I know, North and West Germanic have a good deal more contact with each other than with East Germanic. So North and West Germanic can’t really ‘bracket’ East Germanic.

However, if we have early Germanic loanwords into some combination of Ossetic, Slavic, and Southern Italic/Southern Romance, Gothic seems like a pretty obvious source. Of course, we can’t always rule out Suebian, Lombard, and High German.

Also, there seem to be some odd cases. Lagarimanus, in Ammianus, would seem to have a West Germanic name.

On May 27, 2014, at 3:20 PM, Weidemyr Basti setiez at yahoo.com [gothic-l] <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com> wrote:

OHG and Old English are well researched and all over the etymological dictionaries but what made many of us interested in Gothic in the first place, was our own language's surprisingly many cognates. I guess it is hard to find a word which was only preserved in OHG and Gothic. The Swedish Etymological Wordbook has this under "moder". I translate:
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>Gothic has instead ai𐌸ei = OHG eidî, cmp. runic Sw. ai𐌸u Kärnbo and Finnish loanword äiti (about which most recently Ojansuu Neuphil. Mitteil. 19:58)
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>(Can you see the thorn-signs in the above text, btw?)
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>It seems to me these issues are important for getting the project going:
>1. Ensure the results of our work are properly mirrored, licensed and back-upped.
>2. Find a balance between reference languages that is acceptable to all.
>3. Limit the pace of work so that the few of us who know grammar will have time to correct the most painful errors before they gain broad usage.
>4. Automate part of the decision-making process so the committee/mailing-list will not have to discuss everything but only the cases where someone disagrees with the computer.
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>If you are still around Roelingua, feel free to pick the nice parts of my ideas if there are any. :)
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> RFC-gothic-l-2014-05-26: Point-based Gothic Reconstruction Adviser
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>1. A point-based evaluation is a complement to a manual approval process and a decision by a committee will take precedence over the verdict by this reconstruction adviser. Over the course of many decisions, the adviser will help a committee stay objective with regard to the balance of polation. It will also alleviate their work load so preliminary judgement will be passed automatically when members of the committee are occupied.
>2. The reconstruction adviser should be implemented as a server-side application where many contributors can supply attestations and where software handles the evaluation.
>3. The more points a lemma gets, the more likely it is Gothic. By using a threshold, sufficiently Gothic words may be singled out for inclusion in a lexicon.
>4. We aim to recreate the Moeso-Gothic of year 350 Anno Domini.
>5. Expressions from scriptures written in Wulfilan script and dated prior to 1000 AD are considered Gothic regardless of points.
>6. Related languages are distributed in zones according to appendix A. This is so that geographical and historical connectedness will be accounted for.
>7. Points get awarded according to:
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>P = SUM [x=1 to 7 of language zones](  SUM [y=1 to a of attestations sorted by age] ( A(y)^y))
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>where A(y) is the number of points awarded to an attestation according to:
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>A(y) = 1.000001^(-ABS(year_of_attest_AD - 350_AD)^2)
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>ABS() is the absolute value, so that it returns the time-distance in years from AD 350. A(y) will return a value just below 1 for attestations close to 350 AD and 0.368.. for attestations from year 1350 AD or 650 BC. A(y)^y will ensure that additional attests give points but fewer and fewer. "sorted by age" means, the ones closer to 350 AD will come earlier and have more weight. 
>Points awarded one form of an expression should affect the other forms to the extent their connection has been established.
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>Appendix A
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>Zone 1. OLD INDOEUROPEAN
>Sanskrit, Tocharian, Sogdian
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>Zone 2. SEMITIC & CLASSIC
>Aramaic, Phoenician, Classical Latin, Homeric - Koine Greek
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>Zone 3. NORTH-WESTERN
>Old Irish, Old English, Old West Norse (Icelandic, Norweigan, Faroese)
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>Zone 4. WEST GERMANIC
>Frisian, Dutch, Low German
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>Zone 5. EAST-NORDIC & BALTIC
>Gutnish, Scanian, Elfdalian, Samogitic, Old Swedish
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>Zone 6. OHG
>Old High German
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>Zone 7. SLAVIC
>OCS, Old Slovenian, Russian
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>Zone 8. OTHER
>Finnish, Turkic, Illyrian, Celtic, later Greek & Latin
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