Gothic for Goths - Lesson 06: Raþjan

Learn to count in Gothic so you'll be able to follow the upcoming recipes for making tasty gothic meals!

See the script and vocabulary here: http://ling.everywitchway.net/germanic/east/gothic/gothic-for-goths/lesson-06

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Gothic
• Gothic for Goths
• Gothic language
• numbers
• numerals
• goth
• languages
• linguistics

[aandrusiak]

Great job!

(Except it's so weird to listen to your American accent pronouncing the Gothic U as the German Ü. Can't you say a plain U?)

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@aandrusiak Thanks. I pronounce /iu/ as [y:] ("the German ü"), but plain /u/ is either [u:] when long or [ʊ] when short. /iu/ may also be [ɪu], but I have reason to believe it (eventually, maybe or maybe not by Wulfilas' time) became [y:].

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@giorgioxyzb Of course, since I can't post URLs in comments, you should google the wulfila project - it's a parallel translation of the bible in greek, gothic, and english. I't s very helpful for seeing where the gothic has taken the same grammar as the greek, and more importantly where it deviates.

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@giorgioxyzb Indeed. I'm doing something similar with my other constructed language, northeadish (it's on the same website with the gothic), like oxygen (sȳrvestþ) and hydrogen (vatʀvestþ)... Even "-stoff" is latin, so i picked "-vestþ" for elemental sorts of things, related to "wisan" and "gewesen."

[giorgioxyzb]

@benjaminpauljohnson I'd like I'd knew enough about all these languages (including Greek) to recognize the Greek influence in Gothic texts. At the moment I am trying to learn some Gothic and I can read it a bit (very slowly). Having had a Christian education makes the text pretty familiar and easier to me. :-) But I am far from knowing it at a level that I can write it or speak it. Ik kann nih maþljan nih meljan (how to translate: in Gothic ?).

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@giorgioxyzb I agree, I wouldn't change the grammar. The hard part, really, is determining what the grammar actually was, because so much of what we have is translated verbatim from greek, so it's really using greek grammar, not gothic. But we can extrapolate most of it pretty effectively from the evidence we have from old english, old norse, old high german, old saxon, and old frisian; and, of course, where it deviates from the greek.

[giorgioxyzb]

@benjaminpauljohnson I read that Gothic has not only loans, but also calques from

Greek. Bottomline, I would see no problem using the same procedure to adapt

Gothic to our times.

On the other hand, I would try not to change the grammar.

[giorgioxyzb]

@giorgioxyzb Other example: oxygen is Sauerstoff (stuff you need to produce acids),

hydrogen is Wasserstoff.

Then you have words like herstellen, even though I hear also produzieren very often.

So you probably know all this already, but I wanted to give a few suggestions anyway.

[benjaminpauljohnson]

@giorgioxyzb Precisely! And just like english has an overabundance of latin loans (mostly via french), gothic as far as we know it has the same from greek... although it's unknown if your average Goth would have understood them.

[giorgioxyzb]

@benjaminpauljohnson Ah, ok. I understand.

German and Dutch can give quite a few ideas too.

Unlike in English, in German many words are created using German elements.

So in English you say "depend" while in German you say ab-hängen (to hang off, to hang from). Dutch has afhangen.

By using a similar system, I guess you could get very far with Gothic too!

Fascinating, I would like to start working on this straight away.