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 sizeable 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, mainly Romance, languages.
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.
The language survived as a domestic language in the Iberian Peninsula as late as the eighth century. Gothic-seeming terms are found in manuscripts subsequent to this date, but these may or may not belong to the same language.
A language known as Crimean Gothic survived in isolated mountain regions in Crimea as late as the second half of the 18th century. Lacking certain sound changes characteristic of Gothic, however, Crimean Gothic cannot be a lineal descendant of the language attested in the Codex Argenteus.
The existence of such early attested texts makes Gothic a language of considerable interest in comparative linguistics.

History and evidence

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, 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, leader of a community of Visigothic Christians in the Roman province of Moesia. 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, 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 and the Codex Taurinensis : Five parts, totaling 193 leaves. It contains scattered passages from the New Testament, from the Old Testament, and some commentaries known as Skeireins. The text likely had been somewhat modified by copyists.
* Codex Gissensis : One leaf with fragments of Luke 23–24 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 : Four leaves, fragments of Romans 11–15.
* Codex Vaticanus Latinus 5750 : Three leaves, pages 57–58, 59–60, and 61–62 of the Skeireins. This is a fragment of Codex Ambrosianus E.
* Gothica Bononiensia, 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 and from previously unattested ones.
* Fragmenta Pannonica, 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. 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, two Carolingian-era Gothic alphabets recorded in otherwise non-Gothic manuscripts, a calendar, glosses found in a number of manuscripts and a few runic inscriptions 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, Walafrid Strabo, a Frankish monk who lived in Swabia, writes of a group of monks who reported that even then certain peoples in Scythia, especially around Tomis, spoke a sermo Theotiscus, 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, 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 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 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:

Gothic letter or digraph	Roman equivalent	"Normalised" transliteration	Sound	Normal environment of occurrence	Paradigmatically alternating sound in other environments	Proto-Germanic origin
?	a			Anywhere	—
?	a			Before,	Does not occur
??	ai			Before,,		,
??	ai			Before vowels		,
??	ai			Not before vowels
??	au			Before,,
??	au			Before vowels
??	au			Not before vowels
?	e			Not before vowels		,
??	ei			Everywhere	—	;
?	i			Everywhere except before,,		,
??	iu			Not before vowels
?	o			Not before vowels
?	u			Everywhere except before,,
?	u			Everywhere	—	;

Notes:

The Gothic letters ?, ?, transliterated,, were used only for long close-mid vowels. The digraphs ??, ??, transliterated,, were used for open-mid vowels.
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. 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 or cross-paradigm. 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. . A combination of intra- and cross-paradigm alternation occurs in Class V vs. .
The carefully maintained alternations between iu and iw suggest that ?? may have been something other than. Various possibilities have been suggested ; 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 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 αι, 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 αυ then represented a sequence of a vowel and a spirant 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 to represent originally long vowels ā and ū.. 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.