I have been studying Gothic recently and its cool as fuck!

[Luigi]

The Goths were a Germanic tribe from the Roman era. Raiding Europe, attacking Rome, feasting and fucking, all that good stuff. In the 300s AD they raided Greece and captured a Greek Christian man who they made their slave. He ended up marrying a local woman from the tribe and their son was named Wulfila, meaning Little Wolf(like English "Wolfy"). Wulfila was a native speaker of both Greek and Gothic, so he decided to translate the Greek bible into Gothic. By some insane miracle large segments of Wulfila's bible have survived. Keep in mind these are the days of Rome, hundreds of years before we get the first attestations of later Germanic languages such as Old English or Old Norse. Reading Gothic is like reading German, you understand about a quarter of the words simply by knowing English, and another 50% you will recognize once their meaning has been pointed out to you. Yet this is way cooler than reading German because it was spoken so long ago. When I study other ancient languages, as well as I learn them, there is always a haze. A lack of nuance which comes with not being a native speaker. With Gothic I can salvage a lot of that nuance.

Check out this ancient manuscript section:



This is a section from Mathews Gospel, passage 1:33. Here it is in digitized font:

[......]

You can probably recognize a lot of the letters. Transcribed into our alphabet it is:

[...yah so baurgs alla garunnana was at daura...]

Right away you can recognize the words "was" and "at" are the exact same as English. Gothic "alla" is not far from English "all." Gothic "daur-" is essentially identical to English door. The -a marks dative case which modern English has lost. Baurgs is very similar to its English counterpart -burg/-berg/-burgh, meaning city(e.g. Pittsburgh, iceberg). The English parallel of garunnana would be "arunning" here with the sense of "gathering." Yah is a mix of "ya(same in English)" and "hw(and/also)" and means and. The only word where you don't get any hint from English is "so" which means the/that.

This yields: "And the city all gathering was at door." With English word order we get: "And all the city was gathering at (the) door."

For comparison's sake here is the same passage in Old English(from the 900s AD):

And eall seo burh-waru waes gegaderod to thaere duran. (literally: And all the fortified-city was agathered to there door.)

In early Middle English(from the 1300s AD):

And al the cite was gaderid at the gate (and all the city was gathered at the gate).

And late Middle English(from the 1500s AD):

And all the cite gaddred togedder at the dore (I'm sure you can read it as is).

So ya, Gothic is awesome.

[Canuckster]

This is cool, my son is into this shit will send him a link

[Luigi]

Thats awesome, how old is your son? Intellectual pursuits can only better a youth.

[Canuckster]

He's 24

[Canuckster]

He's into medieval larping and ancient European martial arts and warfare theory and a bunch of other stuff.

He's basically a giant nerd

[Canuckster]

Here's one of his larping getups

[Masato]

This is astounding, Luigi

How again are you able to know so much about languages and such? A personal hobby? Did you study this somewhere?

Its so cool, I know almost nothing of the subject but have tripped out many times considering the roots of language, weird people like Tolkien, Voynage Manuscripts etc.

Do you think a lot of Gothic understanding was damaged or lost after the World Wars? (ie; the vilification of Germany?)

[Masato]

PS: Whats in that pipe?

[Canuckster]

yur guess is as good as mine, but I'm guessing by this pic he might be illuminati.

[Edge Guerrero]

He's into medieval larping and ancient European martial arts and warfare theory and a bunch of other stuff.

He's basically a giant nerd

- Lol. This remember the way the daddy of Still Standing talked about his son.