Re: Italogallic in Zera, and other languages.

Which means that I had to push history too far to make from a different
pattern of Spanish conquering of the Americas from 1492 to having chances of
Gothic surviving in Zera.  Any other European language had disapeared or
being seriously damaged in the last 500 years?

-- Carlos Th

> John Cowan wrote:
>
> 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