Re: Help with IPA, Gothic

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Beau Didler wrote:

> Thanks for all the responses.  It's been a great help.  The source that I'm
> working from is not a complete romanization; the /T/ is still being
> represented by a thorn;  to help in understanding the BP sign, I will show
> examples, Capital L representing the pound;
That _is_ the complete romanisation; the Roman alphabet contains more
letters than the English twenty-six (Scandinavians, for instance, have ø,
Icelanders and Old/Middle English have þ). The letter used for a thorn in
the Gothic alphabet could only remotely be described as a thorn, and the
hwair (your pound sign) was coined to be used in the Latin
transliteration; the Gothic hvair is so incredibly different it's just not
funny (it's an O with a dot in the middle).

> af-Lapjan to choke, quench.
> af_Lapnan to be chocked, be quenched.
> aLa river, water
Yup, that's definately a hwair, so /W/. (ahva, water, is cognate to the i
in island and Latin aqua)

> aiLa-tundi, thornbush, lit. horse tooth.
> ain-Larjiz-uh, everyone each.
>
> I hope that helps you all to see possibly where I'm coming from. As for
> other pronunciation, should I just assume an equivalency to Modern German?
No. My earlier response and John Cowan's response explains the
pronunciation. Ei, for instance, is a long i sound, /i:/, sortof like in
'queen', not the German sound which is a diphthong /ai/. You'd do somewhat
better to pretend your reading Greek in some ways.

Take a look at pages 4--16 (the second group i.e. after 'Main Text', as
PNGs, *definitely* not as HTML which are automatically converted and
contain many errors; TIFF files are rather large) at
<http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/goth_wright_about.html>, it
provides a description of the sounds at the unromanised gothic alphabet.

> Thanks so much.  For those of you who konw it, or wish to take time to look
> it up on the web, I'm basing this all off of the Glossary from Joseph
> Wright's Grammar of the Gothic Language.
>
> I've got a couple of vowel questions as well; throughout the pages I've got
> nearly every vowel at one point or another shown with a hachek (^) can any
> of you explain the meaning of those?  one example is d^ogs = days, /dOgz/
> I'm surmising would be the correct pronunciation, though I'm not sure.
> Thanks again!
That's almost certainly an error when the text was converted. In
particular, the Gothic word for day (nominative singular) was _dags_
*[daxs]; the nominative plural was _dagos_ *[daGo:s], sometimes (e.g. in
Wright's Grammar) transcribed with a macron over the o.

If you're going to use an online version, I hearily recommend the PNGs at
<http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/goth_wright_about.html> (the
address is the same as I gave you in the Germaniconlang post).

--
Tristan