Re: More Gothic text

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.

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