Gothic

Summary

Gothic is the Earliest Germanic Launage to be written down in full form in manuscript — other than isolated Germanic words recorded by Roman writers. Written Gothic dates from the fourth century, several centuries before the ancestor of modern German was committed to writing for the first time. Nevertheless, titles like Gotische Literaturdenkmäler found in the secondary literature are at best optimistic, since most of what we have in the written Gothic language (for the most part Visigothic) are translations of parts of the Greek Bible. Such nonbiblical fragments as survive are small indeed: a fragment of a biblical commentary, which may or may not be a translation; a calendar fragment; a few isolated words (some in a Latin epigram); two subscriptions in legal documents, and, as the last flicker of the Gothic language, a list of words recorded in the Crimea in the seventeenth century.

Allusions in Latin writings about the Goths, and references to Gothic historical figures in works which have survived in other languages lead us to suppose that, as with other early languages, there was an oral tradition of poetry in the vernacular. These may well have been heroic epics associated with the aristocratic warrior classes, but these works have not survived in written form. Elfriede Stutz points out on the first page of her bibliographical handbook that we do not have a single line of Gothic poetry. The fact that what we refer to as Gothic literature means, effectively, an incomplete Bible translation, determines the approach to Gothic. The antiquity of the language and thus the relative closeness to the primitive Germanic ancestor which it, as an East Germanic language, shared with the West Germanic languages (represented now by English and German), and with the Northern group of early and modern Scandinavian languages, make it of great interest to philology. Gothic is associated with other so-called East Germanic languages spoken by tribes such as the Burgundians, the Vandals and the Gepids (classical historians group them with the Goths), the Herulians, and the Rugians. For other languages in that group, such as Burgundian or Rugian, we must rely on place names and personal names for philological evidence, but with Gothic, sufficient material has survived to provide for a solid corpus, even if not every paradigm can be completed from the written material, so that the precise form and gender of some words remain unclear and, of course, much vocabulary is wanting.