Gothic language

Only a few documents in Gothic have survived – not enough for a complete reconstruction of 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: • The largest body of surviving documentation consists of various codices, mostly from the sixth century, copying the Bible translation that was commissioned by the Arian bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila, 311–382), leader of a community of Visigothic Christians in the Roman province of Moesia (modern-day Serbia, Bulgaria/Romania). He commissioned a translation into the Gothic language of the Greek Bible, of which translation roughly three-quarters of the New Testament and some fragments of the Old Testament have survived. The extant translated texts, produced by several scholars, are collected in the following codices and in one inscription: • Codex Argenteus (Uppsala), including the Speyer fragment: 188 leaves. The best-preserved Gothic manuscript, dating from the sixth century, it was preserved and transmitted by northern Ostrogoths in modern-day Italy. It contains a large portion of the four gospels. Since it is a translation from Greek, the language of the Codex Argenteus is replete with borrowed Greek words and Greek usages. The syntax in particular is often copied directly from the Greek. • Codex Ambrosianus (Milan) and the Codex Taurinensis (Turin): Five parts, totaling 193 leaves. It contains scattered passages from the New Testament (including parts of the gospels and the Epistles), from the Old Testament (Nehemiah), and some commentaries known as Skeireins. The text likely had been somewhat modified by copyists. • Codex Gissensis (Gießen): One leaf with fragments of Luke 23–24 (apparently a Gothic-Latin diglot) was found in an excavation in Arsinoë in Egypt in 1907 and was destroyed by water damage in 1945, after copies had already been made by researchers. • Codex Carolinus (Wolfenbüttel): Four leaves, fragments of Romans 11–15 (a Gothic-Latin diglot). • Codex Vaticanus Latinus 5750 (Vatican City): Three leaves, pages 57–58, 59–60, and 61–62 of the Skeireins. This is a fragment of Codex Ambrosianus E. • Gothica Bononiensia (also known as the Codex Bononiensis or "Bologna fragment"), a palimpsest fragment, discovered in 2009, of two folios with what appears to be a sermon, containing besides non-biblical text a number of direct Bible quotes and allusions, both from previously attested parts of the Gothic Bible (the text is clearly taken from Ulfilas's translation) and from previously unattested ones (e.g., Psalms, Genesis). • Fragmenta Pannonica (also known as the Hács-Béndekpuszta fragments or Tabella Hungarica), which consist of fragments of a 1 mm thick lead plate with remnants of verses from the Gospels. • The Mangup Graffiti: five inscriptions written in the Gothic alphabet discovered in 2015 from the basilica church of Mangup, Crimea. The graffiti all date from the mid-9th century, making this perhaps the youngest attestation of the Gothic alphabet (being seemingly slightly more recent than the two Carolingian alphabets listed below). The five texts include a quotation from the otherwise unattested Psalm 76 and some prayers; the language is not noticeably different from Wulfila's and only contains words known from other parts of the Gothic Bible. • A scattering of minor fragments: two deeds (the Naples and Arezzo deeds, on papyri), two Carolingian-era Gothic alphabets recorded in otherwise non-Gothic manuscripts (respectively the late eighth to early ninth century Gothica Vindobonensia and the ninth-century Gothica Parisina), a calendar (in the Codex Ambrosianus A), glosses found in a number of manuscripts and a few runic inscriptions (between three and 13) that are known or suspected to be Gothic: some scholars believe that these inscriptions are not at all Gothic. Krause thought that several names in an Indian inscription were possibly Gothic. Reports of the discovery of other parts of Ulfilas's Bible have not been substantiated. Heinrich May in 1968 claimed to have found in England twelve leaves of a palimpsest containing parts of the Gospel of Matthew. Only fragments of the Gothic translation of the Bible have been preserved. The translation was apparently done in the Balkans region by people in close contact with Greek Christian culture. The Gothic Bible was apparently used by the Visigoths in Occitania until the loss of Visigothic Occitania at the start of the 6th century, in Visigothic Iberia until about 700, and perhaps for a time in Italy, the Balkans, and Ukraine until at least the mid-9th century. During the extermination of Arianism, Trinitarian Christians probably overwrote many texts in Gothic as palimpsests, or, alternatively, collected and burned Gothic documents. Apart from biblical texts, the only substantial Gothic document that still exists – and the only lengthy text known to have been composed originally in the Gothic language – is the Skeireins, a few pages of commentary on the Gospel of John. Very few medieval secondary sources make reference to the Gothic language after about 800. In De incrementis ecclesiae Christianae (840–842), Walafrid Strabo, a Frankish monk who lived in Swabia, writes of a group of monks who reported that even then certain peoples in Scythia (Dobruja), especially around Tomis, spoke a ('Germanic language'), the language of the Gothic translation of the Bible, and that they used such a liturgy. Many writers of the medieval texts that mention the Goths used the word Goths to mean any Germanic people in eastern Europe (such as the Varangians), many of whom certainly did not use the Gothic language as known from the Gothic Bible. Some writers even referred to Slavic-speaking people as "Goths". However, it is clear from Ulfilas's translation that the Gothic language belongs with the Germanic language group, not with Slavic. Generally, the term "Gothic language" refers to the language of Ulfilas, but the attestations themselves date largely from the 6th century, long after Ulfilas had died. ==Alphabet and transliteration==

A few Gothic runic inscriptions were found across Europe, but due to early Christianization of the Goths, the runic writing was quickly replaced by the newly invented Gothic alphabet. Ulfilas's Gothic, as well as that of the Skeireins and various other manuscripts, was written using an alphabet that was most likely invented by Ulfilas himself for his translation. Some scholars (such as Braune) claim that it was derived from the Greek alphabet only, while others maintain that there are some Gothic letters of runic or Latin origin. Gothic words can be transliterated into the Latin script. Transliteration mirrors the conventions of the native alphabet, such as writing long as . There are two variant transliteration systems: a "raw" one that directly represents the original Gothic script and a "normalized" one that adds diacritics (macrons and acute accents) to certain vowels to clarify the pronunciation or, in certain cases, to indicate the Proto-Germanic origin of the vowel in question. The latter system is usually used in the academic literature. Vowels The following table shows the correspondence between spelling and sound for vowels: Notes: • The Gothic letters , , transliterated , , were used only for long close-mid vowels (). The digraphs , , transliterated , , were used for open-mid vowels (short and long ). • The "normal environment of occurrence" refers to native words. In foreign words, these environments are often greatly disturbed. For example, the short sounds and alternate in native words in a nearly allophonic way, with occurring in native words only before the consonants , , while occurs everywhere else (nevertheless, there are a few exceptions such as before in , consistently in the reduplicating syllable of certain past-tense verbs regardless of the following consonant, which indicate that these sounds had become phonemicized). In foreign borrowings, however, and occur freely in all environments, reflecting the corresponding vowel quality in the source language. • Paradigmatic alterations can occur either intra-paradigm (between two different forms within a specific paradigm) or cross-paradigm (between the same form in two different paradigms of the same class). Examples of intra-paradigm alternation are vs. ; vs. ; vs. ; vs. ; vs. ; ?? vs. ; vs. ; vs. . Examples of cross-paradigm alternation are Class IV verbs vs. , vs. ; Class VIIb verbs vs. (note similar preterites , ). A combination of intra- and cross-paradigm alternation occurs in Class V vs. (expected *, compare , ). • The carefully maintained alternations between iu and iw suggest that may have been something other than . Various possibilities have been suggested (for example, high central or high back unrounded vowels, such as ); under these theories, the spelling of is derived from the fact that the sound alternates with iw before a vowel, based on the similar alternations au and aw. The most common theory, however, simply posits as the pronunciation of . The following diacritics, not used in the original writing system, are sometimes added to vowel letters in transliterations: • The acute accent may be added to the digraphs ai, au (written , in Ufilas's alphabet) to indicate their etymological origin in Common Germanic, following a system devised by Jacob Grimm: • is used for the sound derived from the Proto-Germanic short vowels *e and *i before and . • is used for the sound derived from the Proto-Germanic diphthong *ai. Some scholars assume this sound remained a diphthong in Gothic. However, Ulfilas was highly consistent in other spelling inventions, which makes it unlikely that he assigned two different sounds to the same digraph. Furthermore, he consistently used the digraph to represent Greek , which was then certainly a monophthong. A monophthongal value is accepted by Eduard Prokosch in his influential A Common Germanic Grammar. It had earlier been accepted by Joseph Wright but only in an appendix to his Grammar of the Gothic Language. • is used for the sound derived from the Common Germanic long vowel *ē before a vowel. • is used for the sound derived from Common Germanic diphthong *au. It cannot be related to a Greek digraph, since then represented a sequence of a vowel and a spirant (fricative) consonant, which Ulfilas transcribed as in representing Greek words. Nevertheless, the argument based on simplicity is accepted by some influential scholars. • The macron may be added to the letters a and u (written , in Ufilas's alphabet) to represent originally long vowels ā and ū . (Long is transcribed as ei, following the spelling used in the native alphabet). Macrons are often also used in the case of ē and ō; however, they are sometimes omitted since these vowels are always long. Long ā occurs only before the consonants , and represents Proto-Germanic nasalized < earlier ; non-nasal did not occur in Proto-Germanic. It is possible that the Gothic vowel still preserved the nasalization, or else that the nasalization was lost but the length distinction kept, as has happened with . Non-nasal and occurred in Proto-Germanic, however, and so long ei and ū occur in all contexts. Before and , long ei and ū could stem from either non-nasal or nasal long vowels in Proto-Germanic; it is possible that the nasalization was still preserved in Gothic but not written. Consonants The following table shows the correspondence between spelling and sound for consonants: Notes: • is written in the native alphabet with the single letter . It is transliterated by the symbol , which is used only in transliterating Gothic. • is written in the native alphabet with the single letter . It is transliterated as , with no following u. • , however, is written with two letters in the native alphabet, , and hence is transliterated . The lack of a single letter to represent this sound may result from its restricted distribution (only after ) and its rarity. • is transliterated as . • Although the velar nasal functions as an allophone of before and , it is written in the native alphabet as (), following the usage of the corresponding Greek letter gamma. The transliteration of as leads to ambiguity in the context of the sequence : for example, but (compare English 'true'). ==Phonology==

Gothic phonology is reconstructed based on data such as comparison with other Germanic languages, analysis of the transcription of Greek and non-Greek terms and names in Gothic, and analysis of spelling alternations and variations in Gothic texts. Vowels • , and can be either long or short. Gothic writing distinguishes between long and short vowels only for by writing for the short form and for the long (a digraph or false diphthong), in an imitation of Greek usage ( = ). Single vowels are sometimes long where a historically present nasal consonant has been dropped in front of an (a case of compensatory lengthening). Thus, the preterite of the verb (Dutch , German ) becomes (English brought, Dutch , German ), from Proto-Germanic *branhtē. In detailed transliteration, when the intent is more phonetic transcription, length is noted by a macron (or failing that, often a circumflex): , . This is the only context in which appears natively whereas , like , is found often enough in other contexts: (Dutch , German , Icelandic ). • and are long close-mid vowels. They are written as and : (English nigh, Dutch , German ); . • and are short open-mid vowels. They are noted using the digraphs ai and au: (Dutch , German , Icelandic ), (Dutch , German , Icelandic ). In transliterating Gothic, accents are placed on the second vowel of these digraphs aí and aú to distinguish them from the original diphthongs ái and áu: , . In most cases short and are allophones of before . Furthermore, the reduplication syllable of the reduplicating preterites has ai as well, which was probably pronounced as a short . Finally, short and occur in loan words from Greek and Latin ( = , = , = ). • The Germanic diphthongs and appear as digraphs written and in Gothic. Researchers have disagreed over whether they were still pronounced as diphthongs and in Ulfilas's time (4th century) or had become long open-mid vowels: and : (German , Icelandic ), (German , Icelandic ). It is most likely that the latter view is correct, as it is indisputable that the digraphs and represent the sounds and in some circumstances (see below), and and were available to unambiguously represent the sounds and . The digraph is in fact used to represent in foreign words (such as ), and alternations between / and / are scrupulously maintained in paradigms where both variants occur (e.g. vs. past tense ). Evidence from transcriptions of Gothic names into Latin suggests that the sound change had occurred very recently when Gothic spelling was standardized: Gothic names with Germanic au are rendered with au in Latin until the 4th century and o later on ( > ). The digraphs and are normally written with an accent on the first vowel (ái, áu) when they correspond to Proto-Germanic and . • Long and also occur as allophones of and respectively before a following vowel: (Dutch , German ), (Dutch , German ; Icelandic ), also in Greek words (Gk. ). In detailed transcription these are notated ai, au. • The existence of a vowel in Gothic is unclear. It is derived from the use of () to transcribe Greek () or the diphthong (), both of which were pronounced in the Greek of the time. is otherwise used to denote the consonant ). It may have been pronounced . • is usually reconstructed as a falling diphthong (: (Dutch , German , Icelandic ), though this has been disputed (see alphabet and transliteration section above). • Greek diphthongs: In Ulfilas's era, all the diphthongs of Classical Greek had become simple vowels in speech (monophthongization), except for () and (), which were probably pronounced and (they evolved into and in Modern Greek.) In words borrowed from Greek, and are transcribed in extant Gothic manuscripts as , probably pronounced : (Gk. ), (Gk. , via the Latin ). • All vowels (including diphthongs) can be followed by a , which was likely pronounced as the second element of a diphthong with roughly the sound of . It seems likely that this is more of an instance of phonetic juxtaposition than of true diphthongs (such as, for example, the sound in the French word , which is not the diphthong but rather a vowel followed by an approximant): ( For example, with comparable words from modern Germanic languages: • Non-compound words: (English march, Dutch mark); ; (Dutch , German , Icelandic , English bid). • Compound words: • Noun first element: . • Verb second element: (Dutch , German < Old High German g(i)louben by syncope of the unaccented i). ==Grammar==

Morphology Nouns and adjectives Gothic preserves many archaic Indo-European features that are not always present in modern Germanic languages, in particular the rich Indo-European declension system. Gothic had nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases, as well as vestiges of a vocative case that was sometimes identical to the nominative and sometimes to the accusative. The three genders of Indo-European were all present. Nouns and adjectives were inflected according to one of two grammatical numbers: the singular and the plural. Nouns can be divided into numerous declensions according to the form of the stem: a, ō, i, u, an, ōn, ein, r, etc. Adjectives have two variants, indefinite and definite (sometimes indeterminate and determinate), with definite adjectives normally used in combination with the definite determiners (such as the definite article ) while indefinite adjectives are used in other circumstances. Indefinite adjectives generally use a combination of a-stem and ō-stem endings, and definite adjectives use a combination of an-stem and ōn-stem endings. The concept of "strong" and "weak" declensions that is prevalent in the grammar of many other Germanic languages is less significant in Gothic because of its conservative nature: the so-called "weak" declensions (those ending in n) are, in fact, no weaker in Gothic (in terms of having fewer endings) than the "strong" declensions (those ending in a vowel), and the "strong" declensions do not form a coherent class that can be clearly distinguished from the "weak" declensions. Although descriptive adjectives in Gothic (as well as superlatives ending in ) and the past participle may take both definite and indefinite forms, some adjectival words are restricted to one variant. Some pronouns take only definite forms: for example, , adjectives like ('constantly', from the root , 'time'; compare to the English "while"), comparative adjective and present participles. Others, such as , take only the indefinite forms. The table below displays the declension of the Gothic adjective , compared with the an-stem noun and the a-stem noun : This table is, of course, not exhaustive as there are secondary inflexions of various sorts not described here. An exhaustive table of only the types of endings that Gothic took is presented below. • vowel declensions: • roots ending in -a, -ja, -wa (masculine and neuter): equivalent to the Latin and Greek second declension in ‑us / ‑ī and ‑ος / ‑ου; • roots ending in -ō, -jō and -wō (feminine): equivalent to the Latin and Greek first declension in ‑a / ‑ae and ‑α / ‑ας (‑η / ‑ης); • roots ending in -i (masculine and feminine): equivalent to the Latin and Greek third declension in ‑is / ‑is ( ‑ī, -ium) and ‑ις / ‑εως; • roots ending in -u (all three genders): equivalent to the Latin fourth declension in ‑us / ‑ūs and the Greek third declension in ‑υς / ‑εως; • '''n-stem declensions', equivalent to the Latin and Greek third declension in ‑ō / ‑inis/ōnis and ‑ων / ‑ονος or ‑ην / ‑ενος'': • roots ending in -an, -jan, -wan (masculine); • roots ending in -ōn and -ein (feminine); • roots ending in -n (neuter): equivalent to the Latin and Greek third declension in ‑men / ‑minis and ‑μα / ‑ματος; • minor declensions: roots ending in -r, -nd and vestigial endings in other consonants, equivalent to other third declensions in Greek and Latin. Gothic adjectives follow noun declensions closely; they take same types of inflection. Pronouns Gothic inherited the full set of Indo-European pronouns: personal pronouns (including reflexive pronouns for each of the three grammatical persons), possessive pronouns, both simple and compound demonstratives, relative pronouns, interrogatives and indefinite pronouns. Each follows a particular pattern of inflection (partially mirroring the noun declension), much like other Indo-European languages. One particularly noteworthy characteristic is the preservation of the dual number, referring to two people or things; the plural was used only for quantities greater than two. Thus, "the two of us" and "we" for numbers greater than two were expressed as and respectively. While Proto-Indo-European used the dual for all grammatical categories that took a number (as did Classical Greek and Sanskrit), most Old Germanic languages are unusual in that they preserved it only for pronouns. Gothic preserves an older system with dual marking on both pronouns and verbs (but not nouns or adjectives). The simple demonstrative pronoun (neuter: , feminine: , from the Indo-European root *so, *seh2, *tod; cognate to the Greek article ὁ, ἡ, τό and the Latin istud) can be used as an article, allowing constructions of the type definite article + weak adjective + noun. The interrogative pronouns begin with , which derives from the Proto-Indo-European consonant *kʷ that was present at the beginning of all interrogatives in proto-Indo-European, cognate with the wh- at the beginning of many English interrogative, which, as in Gothic, are pronounced with in some dialects. The same etymology is present in the interrogatives of many other Indo-European languages: w- in German, hv- in Danish, the Latin qu- (which persists in modern Romance languages), the Greek τ- or π-, the Slavic and Indic k- as well as many others. Verbs The bulk of Gothic verbs follow the type of Indo-European conjugation called 'thematic' because they insert a vowel derived from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European phonemes *e or *o between roots and inflexional suffixes. The pattern is also present in Greek and Latin: • Latin – leg-i-mus : root leg- + thematic vowel -i- (from *o) + suffix -mus. • Greek – λύ-ο-μεν : root λυ- + thematic vowel -ο- + suffix -μεν. • Gothic – nim-a-m : root nim- + thematic vowel -a- (from *o) + suffix -m. The other conjugation, called "athematic", in which suffixes are added directly to roots, exists only in unproductive vestigial forms in Gothic, just like in Latin. The most important such instance is the verb "to be", which is athematic in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and many other Indo-European languages. Gothic verbs are, like nouns and adjectives, divided into strong verbs and weak verbs. Weak verbs are characterised by preterites formed by appending the suffixes or , parallel to past participles formed with / . Strong verbs form preterites by ablaut (the alternating of vowels in their root forms) or by reduplication (prefixing the root with the first consonant in the root plus ) but without adding a suffix in either case. This parallels the Greek and Sanskrit perfects. The dichotomy is still present in modern Germanic languages: • weak verbs : • Gothic: haban, preterite: habáida, past participle: habáiþs; • English: (to) have, preterite: had, past participle: had; • German: haben, preterite: hatte, past participle: gehabt; • Icelandic: hafa, preterite: hafði, past participle: haft; • Dutch: hebben, preterite: had, past participle: gehad; • Swedish: ha(va), preterite: hade, supine: haft; • strong verbs : • Gothic: infinitive: giban, preterite: gaf; • English: infinitive: (to) give, preterite: gave; • German: infinitive: geben, preterite: gab; • Icelandic: infinitive: gefa, preterite: gaf; • Dutch: infinitive: geven, preterite: gaf; • Swedish: infinitive: giva (ge), preterite: gav. Verbal conjugation in Gothic have two grammatical voices: the active and the medial; three numbers: singular, dual (except in the third person) and plural; two tenses: present and preterite (derived from a former perfect); three grammatical moods: indicative, subjunctive (from an old optative form) and imperative as well as three kinds of nominal forms: a present infinitive, a present participle, and a past passive. Not all tenses and persons are represented in all moods and voices, as some conjugations use auxiliary forms. Finally, there are forms called 'preterite-present': the old Indo-European perfect was reinterpreted as present tense. The Gothic word , from the Proto-Indo-European *woid-h2e , corresponds exactly to its Sanskrit cognate véda and in Greek to ϝοἶδα. Both etymologically should mean "I have seen" (in the perfect sense) but mean "I know" (in the preterite-present meaning). Latin follows the same rule with nōuī . The preterite-present verbs include and among others. Syntax Word order The word order of Gothic is fairly free as is typical of other inflected languages. The natural word order of Gothic is assumed to have been like that of the other old Germanic languages; however, nearly all extant Gothic texts are translations of Greek originals and have been heavily influenced by Greek syntax. Sometimes what can be expressed in one word in the original Greek will require a verb and a complement in the Gothic translation; for example, διωχθήσονται is rendered: : Likewise Gothic translations of Greek noun phrases may feature a verb and a complement. In both cases, the verb follows the complement, giving weight to the theory that basic word order in Gothic is object–verb. This aligns with what is known of other early Germanic languages. However, this pattern is reversed in imperatives and negations: : : And in a wh-question the verb directly follows the question word: : Clitics Gothic has two clitic particles placed in the second position in a sentence, in accordance with Wackernagel's Law. One such clitic particle is , indicating a yes–no question or an indirect question, like Latin -ne: : : : The prepositional phrase without the clitic appears as : the clitic causes the reversion of originally voiced fricatives, unvoiced at the end of a word, to their voiced form; another such example is from . If the first word has a preverb attached, the clitic actually splits the preverb from the verb: from . Another such clitic is , appearing as after a vowel: from , from the imperative form . After or any indefinite besides and , cannot be placed; in the latter category, this is only because indefinite determiner phrases cannot move to the front of a clause. Unlike, for example, Latin -que, can only join two or more main clauses. In all other cases, the word is used, which can also join main clauses. More than one such clitics can occur in one word: from (notice again the voicing of ), from . ==Comparison to other Germanic languages==

For the most part, Gothic is known to be significantly closer to Proto-Germanic than any other Germanic language except for that of the (scantily attested) Ancient Nordic runic inscriptions, which has made it invaluable in the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic. In fact, Gothic tends to serve as the primary foundation for reconstructing Proto-Germanic. The reconstructed Proto-Germanic conflicts with Gothic only when there is clearly identifiable evidence from other branches that the Gothic form is a secondary development. Distinctive features Gothic fails to display a number of innovations shared by all Germanic languages attested later: • It lacks Germanic umlaut. • It lacks rhotacism. The language also preserved many features that were mostly lost in other early Germanic languages: • dual inflections on verbs, • morphological passive voice for verbs, • reduplication in the past tense of Class VII strong verbs, • clitic conjunctions that appear in second position of a sentence in accordance with Wackernagel's Law, splitting verbs from pre-verbs. Lack of umlaut Most conspicuously, Gothic shows no sign of morphological umlaut. Gothic , , can be contrasted with English foot–feet, –, –, –. These forms contain the characteristic change > (English), > (German), > (ON and Danish) due to i-umlaut; the Gothic form shows no such change. Lack of rhotacism Proto-Germanic *z remains in Gothic as or is devoiced to . In North and West Germanic, *z changes to r by rhotacism: • Gothic , ≠ • Old English , (Modern English deer). Passive voice Gothic retains a morphological passive voice inherited from Indo-European but unattested in all other Germanic languages except for the single fossilised form preserved in, for example, Old English hātte or Runic Norse () haitē , derived from Proto-Germanic *haitaną . The morphological passive in North Germanic languages (Swedish gör , görs ) originates from the Old Norse middle voice, which is an innovation not inherited from Indo-European. Dual number Unlike other Germanic languages, which retained dual numbering only in some pronoun forms, Gothic has dual forms both in pronouns and in verbs. Dual verb forms exist only in the first and second person and only in the active voice; in all other cases, the corresponding plural forms are used. In pronouns, Gothic has first and second person dual pronouns: Gothic and Old English wit, Old Norse vit (thought to have been in fact derived from *wi-du literally ). Reduplication Gothic possesses a number of verbs which form their preterite by reduplication, another archaic feature inherited from Indo-European. While traces of this category survived elsewhere in Germanic, the phenomenon is largely obscured in these other languages by later sound changes and analogy. In the following examples the infinitive is compared to the third person singular preterite indicative: • to sow: PGmc *sēaną–*sezō • Gothic saian–saiso • Old Norse sá–seri • to play: PGmc *laikaną–*lelaik • Gothic laikan–lailaik • Old English lācan–leolc, lēc Classification The standard theory of the origin of the Germanic languages divides the languages into three groups: East Germanic (Gothic and a few other very scantily-attested languages), North Germanic (Old Norse and its derivatives, such as Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese) and West Germanic (all others, including Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Dutch, Old Frisian and the numerous modern languages derived from these, including English, German, and Dutch). Sometimes, a further grouping, that of the Northwest Germanic languages, is posited as containing the North Germanic and West Germanic languages, reflecting the hypothesis that Gothic was the first attested language to branch off. A minority opinion (the so-called Gotho-Nordic hypothesis) instead groups North Germanic and East Germanic together. It is based partly on historical claims: for example, Jordanes, writing in the 6th century, ascribes to the Goths a Scandinavian origin. There are a few linguistically significant areas in which Gothic and Old Norse agree against the West Germanic languages. Perhaps the most obvious is the evolution of the Proto-Germanic *-jj- and *-ww- into Gothic (from Pre-Gothic *ggj?) and , and Old Norse ggj and ggv ("Holtzmann's Law"), in contrast to West Germanic where they remained as semivowels. Compare Modern English true, German treu, with Gothic triggws, Old Norse tryggr. However, it has been suggested that these are, in fact, two separate and unrelated changes. A number of other posited similarities exist (for example, the existence of numerous inchoative verbs ending in -na, such as Gothic , Old Norse vakna; and the absence of gemination before j, or (in the case of old Norse) only g geminated before j, e.g. Proto-Germanic *kunją > Gothic kuni, Old Norse kyn, but Old English cynn, Old High German kunni). However, for the most part these represent shared retentions, which are not valid means of grouping languages. That is, if a parent language splits into three daughters A, B and C, and C innovates in a particular area but A and B do not change, A and B will appear to agree against C. That shared retention in A and B is not necessarily indicative of any special relationship between the two. Similar claims of similarities between Old Gutnish (Gutniska) and Old Icelandic are also based on shared retentions rather than shared innovations. Another commonly-given example involves Gothic and Old Norse verbs with the ending -t in the 2nd person singular preterite indicative, and the West Germanic languages have -i. The ending -t can regularly descend from the Proto-Indo-European perfect ending *-th₂e, while the origin of the West Germanic ending -i (which, unlike the -t-ending, unexpectedly combines with the zero-grade of the root as in the plural) is unclear, suggesting that it is an innovation of some kind, possibly an import from the optative. Another possibility is that this is an example of independent choices made from a doublet existing in the proto-language. That is, Proto-Germanic may have allowed either -t or -i to be used as the ending, either in free variation or perhaps depending on dialects within Proto-Germanic or the particular verb in question. Each of the three daughters independently standardized on one of the two endings and, by chance, Gothic and Old Norse ended up with the same ending. Other isoglosses have led scholars to propose an early split between East and Northwest Germanic. Furthermore, features shared by any two branches of Germanic do not necessarily require the postulation of a proto-language excluding the third, as the early Germanic languages were all part of a dialect continuum in the early stages of their development, and contact between the three branches of Germanic was extensive. Polish linguist Witold Mańczak argued that Gothic is closer to German (specifically Upper German) than to Scandinavian and suggested that their ancestral homeland was located in the southernmost part of the Germanic territories, close to present-day Austria, rather than in Scandinavia. Frederik Kortlandt has agreed with Mańczak's hypothesis, stating: "I think that his argument is correct and that it is time to abandon Iordanes' classic view that the Goths came from Scandinavia." ==Influence==

The reconstructed Proto-Slavic language features several apparent borrowed words from East Germanic (presumably Gothic), such as , , vs. Gothic (). The Romance languages also preserve several loanwords from Gothic, such as Portuguese , from Gothic ; , from Gothic ; , from Gothic ; and , from Gothic . Other examples include the French , from Gothic ; , from Gothic ; and the Italian , from Gothic . ==Use in Romanticism and the Modern Age==

J. R. R. Tolkien Several linguists have made use of Gothic as a creative language. The most famous example is "" by J. R. R. Tolkien, part of Songs for the Philologists. It was published privately in 1936 for Tolkien and his colleague E. V. Gordon. Tolkien's use of Gothic is also known from a letter from 1965 to Zillah Sherring. When Sherring bought a copy of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in Salisbury, she found strange inscriptions in it; after she found his name in it, she wrote him a letter and asked him if the inscriptions were his, including the longest one on the back, which was in Gothic. In his reply to her he corrected some of the mistakes in the text; he wrote for example that should be and , which he suggested should be . A semantic inaccuracy of the text which he mentioned himself is the use of for read, while this was . Tolkien also made a calque of his own name in Gothic in the letter, which according to him should be . Gothic is also known to have served as the primary inspiration for Tolkien's invented language Taliska, which, in his legendarium, was the language spoken by the race of Men during the First Age before being displaced by another of his invented languages, Adûnaic. , Tolkien's Taliska grammar has not been published. Others On 10 February 1841, the published a reconstruction in Gothic of the Creed of Ulfilas. The Thorvaldsen museum also has an alliterative poem () from 1841 by Massmann, the first publisher of the , written in the Gothic language. It was read at a great feast dedicated to Thorvaldsen in the in Munich on July 15, 1841. This event is mentioned by Ludwig von Schorn in the magazine from the 19th of July, 1841. Massmann also translated the academic commercium song into Gothic in 1837. In 2012, professor Bjarne Simmelkjær Hansen of the University of Copenhagen published a translation into Gothic of for Roots of Europe. In , an online magazine for art and literature, the poem of Dutch poet Bert Bevers appeared in a Gothic translation. Alice in Wonderland has been translated into Gothic () by David Carlton in 2015 and is published by Michael Everson. == Examples ==

The Lord's Prayer in Gothic: {{fs interlinear |lang=got |ipa3=yes |indent=2 ==See also==

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