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The Gothic language (gutiska razda)
is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths and
specifically by the Visigoths. It is known primarily through a
translation of the Bible dating from the 4th century, and is the
only East Germanic language with a sizeable corpus. All others,
including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from
proper names that survived in historical accounts.
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As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the
Indo-European language family. It is the Germanic language with the
earliest attestation, but it has no modern descendants. The oldest
documents in Gothic date back to the 4th century. The language was
in decline by the mid-6th century, due in part to the military
defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of
the Goths in Italy, massive conversion to primarily Latin-speaking
Roman Catholicism, and geographic isolation. The language survived
in the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) as late as the
8th century, and Frankish author Walafrid Strabo wrote that it was
still spoken in the lower Danube area and in isolated mountain
regions in Crimea in the early 9th century (see Crimean Gothic).
Gothic-seeming terms found in later (post-9th century) manuscripts
may not belong to the same language.The existence of such early
attested corpora makes it a language of considerable interest in
comparative linguistics.
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The native name for the language is unattested, and the
reconstruction gutiska razda is based on Jordanes' Gothiskandza,
read as gutisk-andja, "gothic end (or border)". razda "speech" is
attested, e. g. in Matthew 26:73
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The largest body of surviving documentation consists of
codices written and commissioned by the Arian bishop Ulfilas (also
known as Wulfila, 311-382), who was the leader of a community of
Visigoth Christians in the Roman province of Moesia (modern
Bulgaria). He commissioned a translation of the Greek Septuagint
into the Gothic language, of which roughly three-quarters of the New
Testament and some fragments of the Old Testament have survived.
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Only fragments of the Gothic translation of the Bible
have been preserved. The translation was apparently done in the
Balkans region by people in close contact with Greek Christian
culture. It appears that the Gothic Bible was used by the Visigoths
in Iberia until circa 700 AD, and perhaps for a time in Italy, the
Balkans and what is now Ukraine. In exterminating Arianism, many
texts in Gothic were probably expunged and overwritten as
palimpsests, or collected and burned. Apart from Biblical texts, the
only substantial Gothic document which still exists, and the only
lengthy text known to have been composed originally in the Gothic
language, is the "Skeireins", a few pages of commentary on the
Gospel of John.
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There are very few references to the Gothic language in
secondary sources after about 800 AD, so perhaps it was rarely used
by that date. In evaluating medieval texts that mention the Goths,
it must be noted that many writers used the word Goths to mean any
Germanic people in eastern Europe, many of whom certainly did not
use the Gothic language as known from the Gothic Bible. Some writers
even referred to Slavic-speaking people as Goths.
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The relationship between the language of the Crimean
Goths and Ulfilas' Gothic is less clear. The few fragments of their
language from the 16th century show significant differences from the
language of the Gothic Bible, although some of the glosses, such as
ada for "egg", imply a common heritage.
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Generally, the Gothic language refers to the language
of Ulfilas, but the attestations themselves are largely from the 6th
century - long after Ulfilas had died.
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