Gothic for Goths - Lesson 01: The Alphabet, Part 1

[Visigoth76]

Many thanx Benjamin and GotischOberst for your elnightening answers ;) 

[ANARCHYGOD2012]

Bermudez,all other spanish names in that fashion are of visigoth origin except for saint names and anything beginning the al place names in south of spain. The visigoth were the most romanized out of the germanic tribes so they adopted latin language which in turn became spanish and other iberian languages words like guerra and have to do with war in spanish come from visigothic

[ANARCHYGOD2012]

All modern spanish surnames are of visigothic personal name origin as in rodriguez fernandez valdes pelayo gomez diaz alfonso adolfo ramiro hence ramirez the ez means son of, sancho=sanchez,bermudo=be

[ANARCHYGOD2012]

@benjaminpauljohnson well the visigoths were they say originally from gotland in sweden but there last legacy was on spain its a huge part of spanish history descendants of visigoths pushef the muslims out of spain spanish hero pelayo was a visigoth nobleman who founded kingdom of asturias and started the reconquest

[cognatefriend]

Hello again!! I have a question you might know: what happens with capital letters in Gothic? I mean do you start a sentence with a capital as in our alphabet? Or is it a dot and another sign (this happens when I convert a capital letter into Gothic in Word)? Thanks a million! U rock!

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@cognatefriend Gothic didn't use capital letters as such. If anything, they would have just been written slightly larger at the beginning of a page or paragraph. I think the dots you're talking about are what happens if you try to type a capital letter in the "gothic1" font, but they're really not different. Just do an image search for "codex argenteus" and you'll get the idea.

[Visigoth76]

Sai! I am a noobie gutrazda student, and it was a pleasure to find those interesting videos you've made a few weeks ago. But I have a long time doubt with the word "Rúna", being a substantive, I would like to know how to change it into an adjetive, if possible. Thank you for this enlightment sources!

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@Visigoth76 Sorry I missed this earlier - Are you trying to make the adjective "mysterious" or "secret"? I would be tempted to compound this into something like rūnaleiks. The root form would have been "rūns," your basic a-stem, but something about that as an adjective doesn't feel right to me.

[GotischOberst]

@Visigoth76 If I may throw in my two cents on this, there is an online English-Gothic dictionary (I'm sure Benjaminpauljohnson has seen it) that has a listing for "secret" as an adjective. Here's what it says:

secret (adj.) (hidden) ana-laugns (i-stem), fulgins; (secret, occult) •darneis; (stealthy) *thiubjis; "make secret, conceal" •darnjan, wv. 1.

No copyright infringement intended. Please don't delete this post, YouTube.

[cognatefriend]

Love your videos! do you know how is 'wulfilas' wirtten in goth? Do I just have to translate word by word?

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@cognatefriend Thanks! Yep. And yep! (Well, transliterate, anyway.) Winja - urus - lagu - faihu - eis - lagu - ans - sauwil = Wolf-let!

[GtrDarkSoul]

Does anyone know where I can get the gothic alphabet for Word?

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@GtrDarkSoul You can get a lot of gothic fonts that map gothic letters to the latin keyboard. The font I use in the videos is called "gothic-1". Otherwise, you'll need to learn to use extended unicode subsets for gothic, which is more complicated and I'm not going to go into in this small space.

[redcoatsrule]

how would you say in gothic i want to buy a brow cow that makes much milk?

i want to see how it compares to what what eddie izzard says using old english when he goes to friesland to see if he can be understood.

ic wille bycgan ane brun cu thaet macath mycel meolc its something like that what he says his pronunciation was terrible though.

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@redcoatsrule I would probably say: “Ik wilja áina brūnōn kō bugjan þōei mikila miluk gibiþ," or something similar. And, dude, just the fact that Eddie Izzard knows any old english, regardless of his pronunciation, raises my already high opinion of him. And srsly, whose has excellent old english pronunciation these days? Only this guy: Ooj25_j3k1E (Type that in after the YouTube URL stuff - this guy's my hero!)

[redcoatsrule]

@benjaminpauljohnson Thanks, i've seen him before does a great beowulf he'd do the scops proud. i'm not to keen on eddie though i like some his work but didn't like the program mongrel nation thats what the brun cu thing is from.

[IchWerdeSterben111]

Aha! This video is cute, I like the commentary.

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@IchWerdeSterben111 Thanks! I'm glad you like it!

[VandalHammer]

@SarcasticWino Es ist wirklich laecherlich! Zum Beispiel, er redet "ei" (=lange "i") als "ai" ;-). Und "h" (χ) im Ende nach dieser "Lehrer" ist. offen "h". ;-) "G" in untervokal position er spricht auch als "g". Nein, in Gutiska razada "g" in untervokal position soll mann als"gh" (γ) reden. Auch Aussprache ist kein Gutisks. Wo sind, ueberhaupt, die lange und kurze "o", "i", Diphtongen?

[ShieldStar]

While noting where the letters probably come from, you have to think a little outside of the box. E,e might have looked like an 'M', but turn that in it's side and you have a spiky E. The letter г can also be recognized in this fashion. Also, if you think about it as the voiced component of K (looks like X), you'll notice how similar they look. Also, with K (<), you add a single line, and it becomes a k. L, again, flip it. M, take away the two lines.

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@ShieldStar Exactly. Take a look at Etruscan - thought to be the common link between Greek and runic - and many of those similarities will become clear. Of course, they all go back, along with Hebrew, to Phoenecian.

[MrBastilleCreole]

I've a question mate: Do you have any idea where to find the Gothic characters for my Windows XP? Or how to wirte with them?

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@MrBastilleCreole There are a few gothic fonts out there, with varying levels of correctness and usefulness. In the videos I use a freeware font called Gothic1 (if you search for "download gothic1 font" you'll find hundreds of sources), though i'm working on creating one for use in future videos. There's another twist, however, which is that most fonts use regular latin letters to display gothic characters (e.g. a for ans, c for iggws, etc.)...

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@MrBastilleCreole ...though there are some which use the unicode gothic subset, which has not been fully implemented or supported yet. I'm not sure if those using unicode will work properly in XP. One way to find out, though is to visit the gothic language page on wikipedia and see if you can read it. It's possible you just need to download a font with the right subset, but there may be more you need to do.

[MrBastilleCreole]

@benjaminpauljohnson Hahah thank you!

[MrBastilleCreole]

Very good info mate. We must help reviving these extint languages. Imgine a GOTHIC country.... COOOOOLL!!

[RogueRaven17]

@MrBastilleCreole I'm workin' on it :D

[MrBastilleCreole]

That's cool! I'll help you with the cause.

[WurdBendur]

You used the wrong diacritic for syllabics. The ring below means voiceless. The diacritic you want is a vertical line below.

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@WurdBendur Yes and no. Read further down the comments (@CinnamonTrees) for my response, because I'm not going to keep typing it.

[gluber10]

excuse me, from what country is gothic?

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@gluber10 Gothic isn't from a particular country, but it was spoken by the Goths, who spanned most of Europe at one time or another, migrating from southern Sweden and moving mainly along the area of the Danube river to the Black Sea, then the Visigoths headed west, ending up in France and Spain. The Bishop Wulfilas lived in what is now Bulgaria.

[PinkynPop]

Hey there, I am learning the Gothic language and I am finding this a BIG help. I am just wondering, to help me learn, I downloaded the Gothic language font to my laptop. I was writing down how to pronounce giba, and instead of a kind of r shape, it was an x? :s Do yo uknow why? Thanks

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@PinkynPop It depends on what font you're using. But the x is probably for the iggws character, not really for giba. The font i usually use (called Gothic1) is pretty straightforward, though iggws = c, hwair = x, and þiuþ = v. There aren't many fonts yet that actually use the new unicode 5 gothic subset, but those are more likely to be correct.

[dbootsthediva]

Thank you for the Goth schooling/learning

[GotischOberst]

Another Goth learning and -teaching- Gothic...

Ïk frijo þuk. x.x!

[CinnamonTrees]

Very informative. Thanks for putting these lessons up.

However, I noticed that you used the IPA symbol for voicelessness to indicate syllabicity. It doesn't really matter much, since you explain what you mean, and anyone familiar with the IPA could probably understand you anyway, but I thought you might like to know (although you probably already do, and it's too late to change it).

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@CinnamonTrees Thanks CT. Yes, I'm aware of the syllabic/voiceless issue with IPA. Actually, it wasn't an accident, just a bad habit. It's common for IndoEuropean - and particularly Germanic - linguistics to use a circle beneath a syllabic instead of a vertical line, in much the same way that it's common to use a macron to indicate long vowels rather than ":"

[CinnamonTrees]

@benjaminpauljohnson Thanks for replying. Now that you've brought it up, I actually think I remember that usage from reading about Danish on Wikipedia. I knew I'd seen the circle used for voicelessness somewhere before.

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@CinnamonTrees No, you're absolutely right - the circle SHOULD indicate voicelessness. I suspect that it started to be used when talking about IndoEuropean to describe syllabics simply because it was easier to distinguish a circle from a line, and since there were no unvoiced sonorant consonants in IE (probably), so it just because a bad habit. (Especially considering that old norse and icelandic DID use voiceless l, n, and r!)

[CinnamonTrees]

@benjaminpauljohnson Yeah, sorry about that second comment. I think I have seen the circle used for syllabicity before somewhere, but definitely not in the article on Danish. I'm kinda half asleep, as it's one forty, and I realized my mistake but couldn't remove the comment in time. :) It's off to bed now for me....

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@CinnamonTrees Heh, no worries - 4:00am here, and there was something i saw in my own comment in retrospect that i can't even remember now. Slēp waila!

[iSPaLiTo]

i'm spaniard, i'm very interest in goth language by historic reasons but i can't find a similar work in spanish. May yo make subtitles?

sorry for my terrible english

[MaBu888]

The double n should be more double? 'Stupid' 'mericans. :)

[benjaminpauljohnson]

What does that mean?

[MaBu888]

Explanation: I don't think you're stupid, In fact you are probably very intelligent. I just had some trouble with you not pronouncing the double consonants double. It happens. Perhaps in Gothic they were single as in later Greek, in which case I would retract that prior statement. Though I'm probably too good at pronouncing languages anyone compared to almost anyone else. :)

[benjaminpauljohnson]

Well, aren't you just a talented little petunia.

[CUTIFULGIRL83]

excelente!!!