Re: Italogallic in Zera, and other languages.

Carlos Thompson scripsit:

> Would such line of history had help preserve Prussian
> language?  When was the last known population speaking some
> East Germanic language (Gothic)?
In the 16th century in the Crimea.  But our record is exceedingly scanty:

# The final source of Gothic information is at once the most puzzling
# and the least useful. The Crimean Gothic attestations transcribed
# by the Flemish nobleman Busbecq are fascinating for their historical
# value: that a small enclave of Ostrogoths survived in the Crimea,
# nearly to the modern age, is truly amazing. Linguistically, however,
# relatively little is to be gained from Busbecq's transcription.
# Firstly, he was no linguist, and his orthography is quite peculiar,
# showing corruption from his native Flemish as well as from German;
# so too, his primary informant was not a native Gothic speaker, but
# rather a Greek who claimed to be fluent in the language. In addition,
# we no longer have Busbecq's original manuscript, but only a bad
# copy of a printed edition, full of errors and confusion. In short,
# scholars have managed to place this dialect into the Eastern Gothic
# family, showing as it does remnants of nominative -s endings,
# however dubiously attested.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin