Reconstructing Gothic

[Marja Erwin marja-e@riseup.net [gothic-l]]

Common Slavic was probably in contact with East Germanic, so any Slavic language would probably have borrowings from East Germanic.

However, it’s important to be able to separate borrowings from East Germanic, which are quite likely to be present in any given dialect of Gothic, from borrowings from the rest of Germanic.

Possible criteria:

- Literary claims that certain words were Gothic words.

- Distinctly East Germanic forms.

- Isolation from North and West Germanic. So early South Romance and South Slavic might have stronger contacts with East Germanic than with North or West Germanic, and Ossetian might have contact with East Germanic but isolation from North and West Germanic. I don’t speak Ossetian, alas. I don’t know where to place Romanian because it has had strong contact with West Germanic as well as, presumably, East Germanic. (What about Aromanian?) This would be stronger either with strong isolation, or with presence in multiple languages with closer contacts with East Germanic than North or West Germanic.

On May 29, 2014, at 3:10 PM, Weidemyr Basti setiez at yahoo.com [gothic-l] <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> Thanks Marja!
> 
> I gave only a few examples for each language zone, but completely forgot the Romance languages. 
> 
> @all
> Filling out the holes I found a whole lot of languages that looks like they could have traces of Gothic in them. How about Old Novgorod, Dalmatian, Polabian, Bulgarian and Samalian? Has anybody investigated their Gothic connections? I would like to reach some sort of overview of the resources that are available to us and appreciate hints about obscure languages with possible Gothic connections. :)
> 
> Best regards
> Basti

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