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Re: More Gothic text

From:Joe Fatula <fatula3@...>
Date:Tuesday, April 1, 2003, 2:32
From: "Joe" <joe@...>
Subject: Re: More Gothic text


> Hmm. One of Paul's letters. I can spot a few obvious words, like > 'broþrjus'(Brothers(VOC)) and 'Iesuis Xristaus'(of Jesus Christ). I'd
guess
> 'unsaris' is 'of our'(genetive of 'unsar'). Other than that, it's barely > recognisable.
Looking at Gothic texts, I'm getting the impression that it's a lot further from English than a North Germanic language would be. I'm coming up with some sort of structure of language distance that seems to mean something to me. First you have your core language (the one you speak). Then around it, you've got several languages that you have contact with. These could be personal contact (like my own experiences with Spanish) or diffusionary contact, such as the large number of learned borrowings from Latin in English. So, it could look like this so far: English Latin Spanish French German Now the distance between one language and its ancestor/descendant would be a link as between unrelated languages with contact, same for closely related languages. English Latin Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, French, Sardinian, etc. Spanish Latin, Portuguese, Catalan French Latin German Proto-West-Germanic Branching this diagram out further (as I have it on paper), you can see that Gothic is farther away from English than Italian is, and has less connections leading to it. Changing these links to match your own experience and knowledge might predict a bit better what languages you'll be able to puzzle through.

Replies

John Cowan <cowan@...>
Roger Mills <romilly@...>