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slit fricative

From:Rob Nierse <rnierse@...>
Date:Friday, August 31, 2001, 11:44
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

Reply

Thomas R. Wier <artabanos@...>