Gothic

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

Gothic (gutiska razda),Is an extinct language Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths and specifically by the Visigoths. It is known primarily from Codex Argenteus, a 6th century copy of a 4th century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts.

As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It is the Germanic language with the earliest attestation, but it has no modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the 4th century. The language was in decline by the mid-6th century, due in part to the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy, massive conversion to primarily Latin-speaking Roman Catholicism, and geographic isolation. The language survived in the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) as late as the 8th century, and Frankish author Walafrid Strabo wrote that it was still spoken in the lower Danube area and in isolated mountain regions in Crimea in the early 9th century.

Gothic-seeming terms found in later (post-9th century) manuscripts may not belong to the same language.

The existence of such early attested corpora makes it a language of considerable interest in comparative linguistics.

The native name for the language is unattested, and the reconstruction *gutiska razda is based on Jordanes' Gothiskandza, read as gutisk-andja, "gothic end (or border)". razda "speech" is attested, e. g. in Matthew 26:73 [1].