25 Facts About Gothic language

The language was in decline by the mid-sixth century, partly because of the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation.

The Gothic language survived as a domestic Gothic language in the Iberian peninsula as late as the eighth century.

In particular, a language known as Crimean Gothic survived in the lower Danube area and in isolated mountain regions in Crimea.

Only a few documents in Gothic survived, not enough to completely reconstruct the language.

Apart from biblical texts, the only substantial Gothic document that still exists and the only lengthy text known to have been composed originally in the Gothic language, is the Skeireins, a few pages of commentary on the Gospel of John.

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Generally, the Gothic language refers to the language of Ulfilas, but the attestations themselves are largely from the 6th century, long after Ulfilas had died.

Gothic language has three nasal consonants, one of which is an allophone of the others, all found only in complementary distribution with them.

Accentuation in Gothic language can be reconstructed through phonetic comparison, Grimm's law, and Verner's law.

Gothic language used a stress accent rather than the pitch accent of Proto-Indo-European.

Gothic language had nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases, as well as vestiges of a vocative case that was sometimes identical to the nominative and sometimes to the accusative.

Gothic language adjectives follow noun declensions closely; they take same types of inflection.

Gothic language inherited the full set of Indo-European pronouns: personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, both simple and compound demonstratives, relative pronouns, interrogatives and indefinite pronouns.

Bulk of Gothic language verbs follow the type of Indo-European conjugation called 'thematic' because they insert a vowel derived from the reconstructed proto-Indo-European phonemes *e or *o between roots and inflexional suffixes.

Gothic language verbs are, like nouns and adjectives, divided into strong verbs and weak verbs.

Verbal conjugation in Gothic language have two grammatical voices: the active and the medial; three numbers: singular, dual and plural; two tenses: present and preterite ; three grammatical moods: indicative, subjunctive and imperative as well as three kinds of nominal forms: a present infinitive, a present participle, and a past passive.

The Gothic language word wait, from the proto-Indo-European *woid-h2e, corresponds exactly to its Sanskrit cognate veda and in Greek to ???da.

The natural word order of Gothic is assumed to have been like that of the other old Germanic languages; however, nearly all extant Gothic texts are translations of Greek originals and have been heavily influenced by Greek syntax.

Gothic language has two clitic particles placed in the second position in a sentence, in accordance with Wackernagel's Law.

Gothic language tends to serve as the primary foundation for reconstructing Proto-Germanic.

The reconstructed Proto-Germanic conflicts with Gothic language only when there is clearly identifiable evidence from other branches that the Gothic language form is a secondary development.

In pronouns, Gothic language has first and second person dual pronouns: Gothic language and Old English wit, Old Norse vit "we two".

Gothic language possesses a number of verbs which form their preterite by reduplication, another archaic feature inherited from Indo-European.

Polish linguist Witold Manczak had argued that Gothic language is closer to German than to Scandinavian and suggests that their ancestral homeland was located southernmost part of the Germanic territories, close to present-day Austria rather than in Scandinavia.

Tolkien's use of Gothic language is known from a letter from 1965 to Zillah Sherring.

Gothic is known to have served as the primary inspiration for Tolkien's invented language, Taliska which, in his legendarium, was the language spoken by the race of Men during the First Age before being displaced by another of his invented languages, Adunaic.

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