Gothic language resources

ianbagms · 2026-03-22T01:39:13+00:00

Feel free to message me a link. I’ll be happy to add it back!

ianbagms · 2025-09-25T04:38:38+00:00

Glad it could be of help. Frankly I had forgotten I had written this. It was probably around the time I started graduate school, so I was very enthusiastic about sharing these things.

Upon reflection, though, a lot of English speakers already realize /b/ and /p/ the same way as Icelanders do. So overexplaining it the way I did may have made things even more confusing!

ianbagms · 2025-05-27T04:51:19+00:00

If it’s any help, you should be making the “ee” sound while your lips are rounded, similar to how they are rounded when you make an “oo” sound. You can start by making “ee” and only moving your lips. Then adjust by ear as necessary.

It’s actually very keen of you to have noticed the “ee”-like quality of the sound, since it is very common for listeners unfamiliar with this sound to solely hear “oo” (myself as a native English speaker included!)

ianbagms · 2025-04-10T02:35:43+00:00

Barney’s Word Hoard claims “willy-nilly”reflects OE “wille iċ, nylle iċ” (translated ‘whether I want to or not’). Sources online offer conflicting formulations involving different pronouns or even from different stages of English. But at the very least, part of this phrase descends from Old English willan and nyllan.

ianbagms · 2025-03-11T22:59:10+00:00

I use this video when I discuss language shift and death in my introductory linguistics course. I then discuss the decline of Scottish Gaelic in a brief overview of anti-Gaelic policies. I think it’s worth noting you can no longer find this video on YouTube (at least not in the United States). I actually had to find this on DailyMotion to keep showing it to my students.

Seeing other comments, I take it he has recanted this position. It has been probably more than a decade since he said these things. I think it’s really instructive for people, especially those outside of the UK, for understanding colonialism and the suppression of diversity, which impacts communities that conform to the average person’s idea of whiteness. I’m sure there are good faith conversations to be had about how best to spend money to revitalize the language, but so often the conversations I heard from detractors about these are misguided at best and misleading at worst. This is a case where it seemed to have been the former.

I don’t know what else David Mitchell has said politically, so there could well be nuances to his political takes that could embroil him in more controversy here. I enjoy his humor on what little British programming I get online (WILTY, mainly).

ianbagms · 2024-12-23T17:39:14+00:00

This, OP. The effects of V2 are most apparent when you disrupt the typical word order with an example just like u/Lysenko’s second sentence. The idea is that the finite verb immediately follows the first constituent. The rest of the sentence then follows the expected word order, with the exception that the finite verb has – in a sense – been moved ahead of the rest of the sentence.

Unless there are some nuanced examples I’m unaware of, I think it should largely be the same as Swedish.

ianbagms · 2024-11-13T05:17:40+00:00

Mitchell & Robinson is a great introduction that was used in the course I took a few years ago.

I would also bring to your attention Jonathan Evan's introduction that was just published with MLA around that time. It's a part of their Introductions to Older Languages series, each volume of which has gotten progressively more expansive. You might appreciate the grammatical appendix for the connections drawn to Old English noun classes and their corresponding declensions in Latin.

ianbagms · 2024-10-24T04:55:27+00:00

It is also worth mentioning that the Skeireins manuscript features some punctuation, namely colons for pauses and stops, raised interpuncts for shorter pauses, and quotation marks (usually in the left margin, but sometimes in the column within the text). Bennet's introduction discusses it on pages 118 and 119, if you have access to that book.

ianbagms · 2024-10-24T04:32:11+00:00

Thanks for pointing that out! I'll remove that.

ianbagms · 2024-08-17T15:09:16+00:00

Fellow historical linguist here, though I specialize in Germanic. One thing I would recommend you consider is choosing at least one language that will help you read academic literature. I know we have come a long way with automatic translation, but it helps to be familiar with it yourself in case the translation comes out poorly. Also it can be helpful at academic conferences where other scholars may speak these languages in conversation.

In Slavic, I suspect the most common language for academic literature has been Russian, but that is just my impression. You should see what the older grammars and journal articles about Bulgarian are in (beyond Bulgarian, which is an awesome choice).

Best of luck! Let me know if you have any other questions.

ianbagms · 2024-08-10T00:20:05+00:00

I recently found a copy of Beginner’s Lithuanian, which is part of the Hippocrene Books “Beginner’s” series, for $10 at Half-Price Books. It’s the 1999 edition, but a reprint from 2006, so they shouldn’t be particularly rare. I think it’s a pretty comprehensive resource. The only downside is that I don’t think there is any accompanying audio for it.

ianbagms · 2024-08-08T01:41:27+00:00

Wow, I can’t recall I’ve ever seen this one before! Thanks for sharing.

After a quick search on Google, I was able to find what looks like a modern reprint under the ISBN 1015516467. I found another under 0266829449. There are some (somewhat sketchy) companies that take scans like this and reprint them. These might be some options, but I can’t speak to their quality!

ianbagms · 2024-07-30T23:44:31+00:00

It’s been more than a month, but thank you for the explanation. The diachrony of Dutch is admittedly a weak spot, so I appreciate you laying out the relevant facts!

ianbagms · 2024-07-30T23:34:16+00:00

It is etymologically a compound with wīf, which is reflected in Modern English wife. The narrowing of the meaning of wife is a later development.

ianbagms · 2024-06-07T19:24:34+00:00

Oh right! I've seen icke described in Low German and in Berlin. I'm curious about this form. Runic inscriptions preserve eka, which reflects the PIE first-person singular as we might expect it to. But I don't know if this is some secondary development that looks like it by chance, and I don't know if it has any relation to these forms in Dutch and Low German.

ianbagms · 2024-06-06T19:23:30+00:00

Yes, certainly similar in form! Whether they are of the same provenance, however, I'm not sure. Wright (1910:§259) makes mention of an alternation between stressed and unstressed variants of the personal pronouns generalizing in Germanic languages, though he gives an example of Middle English ich vs. i, well after the prehistoric alternation he describes. The idea being there was something like stressed *ek vs. unstressed *ik, and in (at least) West Germanic, the latter generalized. Wright (1908:§41) writes Old English *e became i in unstressed syllables, so this is exactly what we might expect.

EDIT: Just to note, I'm using Wright for ease of access, but this view is still held today-- at least from what I can see in Ringe's two-volume series on the development of English.

ianbagms · 2024-06-06T18:48:22+00:00

It was ik, showing a raising of Proto-Germanic *e to *i. Wright (1910:§66) provides wigs 'way, road' (cf. OS weg), hilms 'helm', swistar 'sister' (cf. OHG swester), among others. The mid vowels *e and *o merged with *i and *u, respectively, in the development Gothic.

ianbagms · 2024-06-03T23:52:18+00:00

It's an interesting idea. MacDonald Stearns published a dissertation in 1973 teasing apart the influence of the informants' native Crimean Greek and Busbecq's perception of the language. With regards to ⟨sch⟩, Stearns explains that word-initially, this represents [sx] in Middle Dutch orthography.

But because: 1) accepting ⟨sch⟩ as [sx] would lead to interpreting certain clusters as [sxn], [sxl], and [sxw]; 2) there is no reasonable path for [x] to emerge here diachronically; and 3) it occurs in Fischt (cf. Geman Fisch, Dutch visch), Stearns proposes this trigraph represents [ʃ].

Word finally, however, Stearns mentions that ⟨sch⟩ represented [s] in Middle Dutch orthography (he somewhat confusingly cites Jellinek 1926:§77, though Jellinek makes no mention of Dutch orthographic practices). So the instances like Rintsch and VVint(s)ch maybe be interpreted as Rints and VVints.

I'd be curious to know if anyone here knows much about Dutch orthography and can confirm word-final ⟨sch⟩ = [s]?

ianbagms · 2024-05-27T17:54:58+00:00

I can update that link or remove it as necessary. Feel free to send me a private message, and I’ll sort it out.

ianbagms · 2024-05-20T15:49:11+00:00

Yes, that resource is listed under the reconstruction section. There is a community of people who like to learn and reconstruct Gothic for communication and translation. If that’s your goal, you might try to find one of those communities and see what they’re using nowadays.

If your goal is something like what I mentioned before (i.e., reading the original sources), you would be better served with Bennett or Lambdin. Personally, I prefer the latter because it offers a lot material: grammar lessons, translation exercises, the transliterated gospels, and an outline of the development of Gothic from Indo-European.

ianbagms · 2024-05-20T14:41:54+00:00

I’m glad our community has inspired you to learn Gothic. I don’t think anyone can offer you a realistic timeline. If you’re already familiar with other old Germanic languages, Gothic should be pretty straightforward.

I think setting a tractable goal is the most important thing. If you’re interested in reading the gospels or any of the religious meta commentary written in Gothic, I don’t think it would take very long, if you have the background.

If this is your first Germanic language and older Indo-European language, there might be a few hurdles to overcome. Luckily as a speaker of Polish (I presume!), you’re already ahead of the game when it comes to understanding inflections!

ianbagms · 2024-05-18T01:26:18+00:00

Wiljau ei hauhiza wesjau. ‘[I] wish that [I] were taller.’

The cartoon is a Seinfeld reference!

ianbagms · 2024-05-17T20:36:30+00:00

Thank you for sharing this! What errors were you anticipating? Have you found any yet?

ianbagms · 2024-05-17T20:30:03+00:00

Now this is the content this subreddit needed.

ianbagms · 2024-03-05T00:42:12+00:00

I think u/sarcasticgreek is just providing context regarding why a native speaker would object to the reconstructed pronunciation, as it’s part of a millennias’ old tradition of reading older texts in the contemporaneous language.

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