[gothic-l] addendum to <ai> and <au>

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

A number of weeks ago, I presented arguments in favour of a monothongal pronunciation of the digraphs <ai> and <au> in Wulfilian Gothic. As an addendum, the following may also be considered.
 

 The so-called Salzburg-Vienna Alcuin Manuscript contains a few leaves giving particulars about Greek, Anglo-Saxon runes, and Gothic. Among the very few comments about pronunciation, one reads
 

 "jah libaida. // diptongon .ai. p[ro] e. longa"
 

 ['jah libaida,' the diphthong [= digraph] 'ai' for long 'e']
 

 That is, the writer gives an example of a Gothic phrase "jah libaida" and then explains how the digraph <ai> is to be pronounced in the word, namely as a "long 'e'."
 

 The Alcuin manuscript dates from the 790s, but it can hardly represent a Gothic spoken at that time, as it is highly doubtful whether the descendants of those Goths who had settled in France, Spain, or Italy during the Migration Period could still speak the language. It is generally assumed these migrant Goths were fairly quickly assimilated, at least linguistically, to the Latin-speaking populations there, who were far in the majority. The section on Gothic and Anglo-Saxon runes in the manuscript appears to have been included out of an antiquarian interest.
 

 And even if there were still pockets of descendants who could speak Gothic in the aforementioned areas, it would be most unlikely that the <ai> could still represent a "long" vowel, as already by the early sixth century, it is clear from Latinized Gothic names, as found in Jordanes (who was a Goth himself) and elsewhere, that unstressed vowels in Gothic were already being reduced, evidently on their way to schwa. Indeed, this is general pattern throughout the Germanic-speaking world of the first millennium AD.
 

 Of course, if one insists on ruling this detail out because it is not contemporary with Wulfilian Gothic and assumes that <ai> and <au> must represent /ai/ and /au/ simply because some of the vowels represented by these digraphs in Wulfilian Gothic go back ultimately to Proto-Germanic diphthongs, then the same objection can be raised to the latter assumption, namely, that one has assumed values that belong to a non-contemporaneous period. By the same token, one might argue that the 'o' in <stone> and <bone> should be pronounced [ai] because that was likewise the vocalic value in Proto-Germanic. Wulfilian Gothic, no more than Modern English, is not Proto-Germanic.
 

 Edmund
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20150318/aacc02d7/attachment.htm>