Are books still being written in the “dead language” Gothic ?
Our library’s Special Collections department has many shelves of books written in the old Gothic language.
Is it still used anywhere, even in academia?
IIRC, “Gothic” is a font, not a language.
I believe you’re probably thinking of the language, Latin, that was the bane of many a schoolchild in the past (but, sadly, not myself).
Dead languages are called “dead” for a reason.
Gothic has been a dead language for over 400 years. It was last reported being spoken in the Tatar Khanate of Crimea. But in Western Europe it died out after the fall of the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy in the 6th century (it is doubtful whether Gothic survived among the Visigoths of Spain unti the Arab conquest of 711).
The only Gothic literature I know of consists of a Bible translation made by Bishop Ulfilas in the 4th century. I don’t know how your “many shelves” of books could result from just one Bible translation. There might be scholarly studies of Gothic grammar and philology.
Why don’t you post some of the titles from these many shelves of Gothic? Also tell us the range of call numbers in these shelves. The library scientists here can then tell you what the subject of the books really is. In Library of Congress classification, books on Gothic have call numbers in the range from PD1101 to PD1211. (PD is the subclass for Germanic languages.)
Only one person in modern times was fluent enough in the ancient Gothic language to actually write new literature in it.
He was an expert on all ancient Germanic languages (Gothic, Old Norse, Old English) as well as Middle English. When his high school had a Roman Empire-themed toga party, he dressed as an ancient Goth in furs and helment, and delivered a speech he had written in Gothic. He published a poem or two in Gothic in a privately printed anthology at Oxford in 1936.
His name was J. R. R. Tolkien.
**Bagme Bloma **
(a poem in the ancient Gothic language by J. R. R. Tolkien).
Brunaim bairiþ bairka bogum
laubans liubans liudandei,
gilwagroni, glitmunjandei,
bagme bloma, blauandei,
fagrafahsa, liþulinþi,
fraujinondei fairguni.
Wopjand windos, wagjand lindos,
lutiþ limam laikandei;
slaihta, raihta, hweitarinda,
razda rodeiþ reirandei,
bandwa bairhta, runa goda,
þiuda meina þiuþjandei.
Andanahti milhmam neipiþ,
liuhteiþ liuhmam lauhmuni;
laubos liubai fliugand lausai,
tulgus, triggwa, standandei.
Bairka baza beidiþ blaika
fraujinondei fairguni.
Flower of the Trees
The birch bears fine leaves on shining boughs, it grows pale green and glittering, the flower of the trees in bloom, fair-haired and supple-limbed, the ruler of the mountain.
The winds call, they shake gently, she bends her boughs low in sport; smooth, straight and white-barked, trembling she speaks a language, a bright token, a good mystery, blessing my people.
Evening grows dark with clouds, the lightning flashes, the fine leaves fly free, but firm and faithful the white birch stands bare and waits, ruling the mountain.
Note: the old Germanic runic letter thorn (þ) is pronounced like the th in thin.
The letter h in Gothic is pronounced as a velar spirant kh.
J is pronounced like English y.
The Gothic digraph ei is pronounced like the ee in green. The other vowels are as in Italian.
Originally published in 1936 in Songs for the Philologists. Reprinted, with this English translation, in The Road to Middle-Earth by T. A. Shippey (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982).
Are you sure these books are in the Gothic language and not, as Alessan suggested, simply in a Gothic style of writing? This is not a subject I know very much about at all, but I know that in parts of Europe there was an old style of handwriting still in use until at least the WWII era, and I think it was called Gothic.
I believe Gothic in the age of books ( as opposed to the Goths who sacked Rome)
refers to the language centered in Gottland, the Baltic island, who were the modern descendents.
Gothic thus was the basis for modern Danish, Swedish, and Estonian.
Similar to Old English or Saxon to Modern English.
There are indeed many works, such as the old romance Isolde.
The cite for J. R. R. Tolkien is highly believeable, since his series on the Hobbits was a reconstruction of Northern European fairy tails.
I just starting reading the Hobbit for the first time in half my lifetime last night. This brings back a lot of memories.
Like how some of my friends would commmunicate using the runes found in Tolkien’s books. It was more of a code than a language of course, but it was very interesting. Kids would write these messages on the board and leave them there for kids in the next class who were in the know of the runes.
I imagine they got the runes from The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle Earth by Ruth S. Noel. I remember seeing this in a book store once; I’m wishing I picked it up now.
I don’t know where you get your information. The Gothic language is dead, and no living language s are directly descended from it. Gothic was an East Germanic language. Danish and Swedish are North Germanic languages descended from Old Norse. (Modern High German, Dutch, and English are all West Germanic languages). The earliest known writing about Isolde is from a German-language manuscript (circa A.D 1200), although the story is believed to be of Celtic (and hence non-Germanic) origin. Estonian is not even an Indo-European language, let alone descended from Gothic.
I’m not the scholar any of you are (I had to look up “incunabulum”), but when I searched on “Gothic language” I got this link tying some of those things above together
Sweden, gothic history and Gotland-in the middle of the south Baltic sea!
"This happened probably in the 400c. “So they settled there and live there and yet today they have in their talk traces of our language”.
Strange enough the antic historians tell a story very similar to that about the Visigoths preceeding the battle of Adrianopolis,376 AD. Gutonians started to leave already before that! At the latest 700 B.C, they began to build ships in stone around the Baltic sea: In Aland(Finland east of Sweden), Kurland(Kurzeme-Latvia), Ösel(Saremaa-Estonia), you can find them. Early gotlandic contacts? Do you want to send a free postcard from Gotland/Gutland? The sunwheel you get when opening the picture you can find on gotlandic picturestones from the 500c-800c. A picturestone with the same motive, in Leon in Spain, and on shields carried in scriptures by visigothic warriors. "
Maybe more searching is in order?
From The World of Words by Victor Stevenson:
So it seems that East Germanic is related more to North Germanic than West Germanic. This is not especially meaningful since at the time they migrated from Sweden, the three branches of Germanic were not that different from each other.
Of course the OP is probably talking about his library’s Special Collection of Gothic romances…
Don’t purchase this book. It is riddled with mistakes, and it predates the crucial Etymological Appendix in Book 4 of the History of Middle Earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Noel’s was a good attempt but is outdated and inconsistent.
In English, Gothic refers to both a (very) dead language of the East Germanic sub-group (as described by several posters) and a manner of writing/set of typefaces, extensively used by German-speaking areas of Europe until WWII.
ishmintingas is right on the money: there just aren’t enough extant Gothic (language) texts to fill up “many shelves of books”.
The number of books printed in what English speakers confusingly call the Gothic typeface (Frakturschrift in German), on the other hand, would easily fill up a large library.
A quick search on Fraktur on Google turned up this page:
http://www.typographer.de/english/fraktur.htm
which says that Fraktur fell out of favour after WWI, and that since WWII “…Fraktur became closely and solely with the Third Reich”, though considering it had been used for several hundred years before Hitler, that would be akin to Russia ditching the Cyrillic alphabet because of its Stalinist associations.
This means that most German books printed before 1945 are difficult to read until you adjust to the typeface (espcially if you don’t speak German:)).
I remember I once tried to read “Die Leide des Junge Werther” by Goethe in German, in that typeface. Let me tell ya, I didn’t get past more than a few pages of that!
Even if you do speak German it’s very hard to get used to Fraktur. In fact it’s so bad that I can’t see why anyone would ever have printed books in it, except that possibly in
the early days of printing it was easier to produce the angular forms of Fraktur rather than the rounded letters of Roman type.
However, in Germany today you’ll still see Fraktur used in
signs, shop names, and so forth, to add a quaint Old World touch.
As long as this thread has turned into a freeforall on Goth lore, let me make mention of the tenth-century Spanish Arab historian Ibn al-Qûtîyah. His name is Arabic for ‘son of the Goth woman’. He was descended on his mother’s side from the Visigoths of Spain, who were still there over two centuries after the Arab conquest, and his writing is the most important source material for the history of early Islamic Spain.
The idea that people would confuse Gothic novels with the Gothic language is really strange. Who (unless he only buys books at the supermarket) would ever think that?
The idea that fraktur could be confused is also funny, although many people seeing it for the first time do confuse it with either Black Letter or Runic, since all three seem to haunt Dungeon and Dragon type games.
The answer is Yes, incunabulum, people do still write in the Gothic language. (It may be “dead”, but so is Latin, written in every day on every topic.)
Here are a couple of links for people who want to practice.
The Lord’s Prayer in Gothic
**Gothic language - Britannica.com**Gothic has many archaic features, among which are dual number (a plural form expressing two persons or things as distinct from three or more), reduplication (repetition of part of a word) in one class of verbs, special vocative case forms in two classes of nouns, and passive voice forms in the verbs. These occur seldom, if at all, in the other Germanic languages that began to appear in writing several centuries later. Gothic also shows no trace of the umlaut found in the later Germanic languages.
Gothic persisted longer in the Crimea than in Spain and Italy. In 1560-62 a Flemish diplomat, Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, then serving in Constantinople as the ambassador from Ferdinand I of Austria, collected a number of words and phrases from the Crimean Goths showing that their language was still essentially a form of Gothic.
Archaic features
Gothic shows a number of archaic features that had been almost or entirely lost by the time the other Germanic languages began to appear in writing; among these are a passive voice and one type of past tense formed with reduplication, a dual number in the first and second persons of its verbs and pronouns, and a special vocative case in one noun class. At the same time, Gothic also shows changes from Proto-Germanic, among which are the shortening of most long vowels in final unstressed syllables and the loss of most short vowels (e.g., Proto-Germanic *erþo ‘earth’ became Gothic airþa, Proto-Germanic *stainaz ‘stone’ became Gothic stains). Finally, voiced fricatives that occurred or came to occur at the end of a word are unvoiced (e.g., nominative *hlaiaz, accusative *hlaian ‘bread, loaf’ changed to hlaifs and hlaif, respectively [but dative hlaiba]).
Gothic-Language Discussion Group
eGroup discussion board for discussion *in Gotish(Gothic) * These people are writing in Gothic today, for scholastic reasons.
Gothic alphabet
writing system invented in the 4th century AD by Ulfilas, an Arian bishop, for recording the Gothic language; this writing system should not be confused with “Gothic script,” a form of the Latin alphabet. The Gothic alphabet had 27 letters, 19 or 20 of which were derived from Greek uncial script, 5 or 6 modified slightly from Latin, and 2 either borrowed from runic script or invented independently.
Can we get a cite on that one?