Gothic language: Encyclopedia II - Gothic language - Gothic compared to other Germanic languages

Gothic language - Gothic compared to other Germanic languages

Gothic language - Gothic and Old Norse

The Goths had a tradition of a Scandinavian origin, and there are linguistic similarities with Old Norse, especially with its dialect Old Gutnish. The number of similarities that Old Gutnish had with Gothic made the prominent linguist Elias Wessén classify it as a Gothic dialect. This is a text sample from the Gutasaga about a migration to southern Europe (Manuscript from the 14th century):

The main points cited for grouping North and East Germanic are:

1) The evolution of the Proto-Germanic *-jj- and *-gg- into Gothic ddj (from an older Gothic ggj?) and ggw and Old Norse ggj and ggv ("Holtzmann's law"). For instance, the Old High German genitive of zwei (two) is zweio, which is distinct from Gothic twaddje and Old Norse tveggja. Whereas German has the form treu, Gothic has triggws and modern Swedish trygg.

2) The existence of numerous inchoative verbs ending with -na, such as Gothic waknan and modern Swedish vakna.

3) Gothic is important for the understanding of the evolution of Proto-Germanic into Old Norse through Proto-Norse. For instance, the final -n in North Germanic languages, such as navn and namn (name) is explained by referring to Gothic in which namo had its plural genitive namne. Sometimes, Gothic explains forms of words found on the oldest runestones, such as the Gothic word gudja (gothi, man serving as priest) which explains the word gudija found on the runestone of Nordhuglo in Norway.

But there have also been theories grouping West and East Germanic. Today, the three groups are generally treated as derived independently from Proto-Germanic.

Gothic language - Other unique features of Gothic

Being the first attested Germanic language, Gothic fails to display a number of traits that are shared by all other known Germanic languages. Most conspicuously, Gothic contains no morphological umlaut; the Gothic word gudja "priest" can be contrasted with the Old Norse gydja ("priestess"); the Norse form contains the characteristic change /u/ > /y/ that indicates the influence of i-umlaut in Proto-Norse; the Gothic form shows no such change.

Gothic retains a passive voice inherited from Indo-European, but unattested in all other Germanic languages. Gothic preserves several verbs that display reduplication (haitan, "to be called" > haihait; cf. Norwegian heita German heißen, archaic English hight) in the formation of the preterit; another Indo-European inheritance that has left only a few traces in Old English, Old Norse and Old High German.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Gothic compared to other Germanic languages", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki