slit fricative

Sorry for replying a bit late :(

Wier responded:

> When is this Gothic pidgin supposed to be present?  The last Gothic speakers
> died out in the Crimea sometime in the late 1600s, IIRC, and I am not aware
> of any studies or even reports about Gothic as a language at that time.
It is supposed to be present in the seventeenth century. I know it died out,
so I had to invent an alternate timeline. And I'm not very good at conculturing.
To be frankly, I have no idea why they survived in this alternate time.

> It could
> well be that by that time, Gothic phonology had changed quite radically, and
> could well have already shifted the original [T] to something else, precluding any
> need to worry about what [T] shifts to.
Hmm, I never thought of this. At first I thouht it should not have changed much,
because of these accounts:
"A Venetian named Joseph Barbaro, who lived in Tana (an Italian commercial
settlement at the mouth of the Don river) between 1436and 1462, wrote that
his German servant could talk with a Crimean Goth aseasy as a Florentine
with a Genovese. A German chronicle mentions thefact that, in the 16th century,
merchants from Nürnberg, thrown by a stormon the Crimean coast, have found
a young native who could answer to theirquestions asked in German.

In about 1750 a Jesuit from Vienna named Mondorf ransomed a prisoner
from the Turkish galleys who turned out to be from the Crimea and whose
native language bore a resemblance to German. If this wasa corrupted form of
Gothic, this means that there were stillpeople speaking (something like)
Gothic as recently as 250 years ago."

I checked the Gothic list and came across the following words:

bruder = brother (Go. bróþar)
goltz = gold (Go. gulths)
statz = earth, ground (Go. staths 'place')
tzo = thou (Go. thu)

So  it looks like the sound rules are like this?:
VTV>VdV
Ts>tz or T#>t
#T>#tz

Also, the word wichtgata = white (Go. hweitata) shows that a lot has changed.
This 'discovery' gives me a lot of works :(

> How would they pronounce [T]. As a [t] like on the obscure island of Brooklyn?
> Or as [s], like some Dutch speakers do?
>
> I think Russian borrowed Greek loans with [T] as [f], as in Fyodor (< Theodore).
> Also, the archaic Cyrillic character identical in form to Greek theta is pronounced
> "fita".
Ah, this is very useful information! Thanks!

Rob

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