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

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

Interesting Edmund, how were ai and au written in theGothic manuscripts in
which Gothic texts were transliterated in Latin?

2015-03-18 18:11 GMT+01:00 edmundfairfax at yahoo.ca [gothic-l] <
gothic-l at yahoogroups.com>:

>
>
> 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
>
>  
>
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