GOTHIC LANGUAGE AND ALPHABET.pptx

GOTHIC LANGUAGE AND ALPHABET

1. GOTHIC LANGUAGE AND ALPHABET

2. GOTHIC LANGUAGE Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable text corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, and French.

3. The expansion of the Germanic tribes As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any sizable texts, but it lacks any modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the fourth century. The language was in decline by the mid-sixth century, partly because of the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation (in Spain, the Gothic language lost its last and probably already declining function as a church language when the Visigoths converted to Catholicism in 589).

4. HISTORY AND EVIDENCE Only a few documents in Gothic survive, not enough to completely reconstruct the language. Most Gothic-language sources are translations or glosses of other languages (namely, Greek), so foreign linguistic elements most certainly influenced the texts. These are the primary sources: Codex Argenteus (Uppsala), including the Speyer fragment: 188 leaves Codex Ambrosianus (Milan) and the Codex Taurinensis (Turin): Five parts, totaling 193 leaves Codex Gissensis ( Gießen ): One leaf with fragments of Luke 23–24 Codex Carolinus (Wolfenbüttel): Four leaves, fragments of Romans 11–15 Gothica Bononiensia (also known as the Codex Bononiensis )

5. Influence The reconstructed Proto- Slavic language features several apparent borrowed words from East Germanic ( presumably Gothic ), such as * xlěb ъ, " bread ", vs. Gothic hlaifs .[22] The Romance languages of Iberia also preserve several loanwords from Gothic , such as Portuguese " agasalho " (warm clothing ), from Gothic * 𐌲𐌰𐍃𐌰𐌻𐌾𐌰 (* gasalja , “ companion , comrade ”); ganso ( goose ), from Gothic * 𐌲𐌰𐌽𐍃 (* gans , " goose "); " luva " ( glove ), from Gothic 𐌻𐍉𐍆𐌰 ( lōfa , “ palm of the hand ”); and " trégua " ( truce ), from Gothic 𐍄𐍂𐌹𐌲𐌲𐍅𐌰 ( triggwa , “ treaty ; covenant ”).

6. GOTHIC ALPHABET Gothic was originally written with a Runic alphabet about which little is known. One theory of the origins of Runes is that they were invented by the Goths, but this is impossible to prove as very few inscriptions of writing in Gothic runes survive. The Gothic alphabet was invented around middle the 4th century AD by Bishop Wulfila (311-383 AD), the religious leader of the Visigoths, to provide his people with a written language and a means of reading his translation of the Bible. It is based on the Greek alphabet, with some extra letters from the Latin and Runic alphabets.

7. Diacritics and punctuation Diacritics and punctuation used in the Codex Argenteus include a trema placed on 𐌹 i , transliterated as ï, in general applied to express diaeresis , the interpunct (·) and colon (:) as well as overlines to indicate sigla (such as xaus for xristaus ) and numerals.

8. Letters Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. Two letters used in its transliteration are not used in current English: thorn þ (representing /θ/), and hwair ƕ (representing / hʷ /). As with the Greek alphabet, Gothic letters were also assigned numerical values. When used as numerals, letters were written either between two dots (•𐌹𐌱• = 12) or with an overline (𐌹𐌱 = 12).

9. Sample text in Gothic (The Lord's Prayer)

10. What are the four classification of Gothic letters? In the Type Index of that volume the gothic types are grouped as follows : (a) Square Church Types =» Textur ; (b) Rounded Church and Heading Types = Rotunda ; (c) Latin Text Types = small Rotundas, and (d) Vernacular German Types = Bastardas .