Gothica Bononiensia

One of our contributors noted a while back the discovery of new Gothic manuscript material (here).  The scholars who've done the deciphering and interpretation contacted Team Verb and offered to send us copies of a couple of their articles on the subject, which have arrived:

• Finazzi, Rosa Bianca & Paola Tornaghi. 2014. Alcune riflessioni sul palinsesto gotico-latino di bologna. Intorno alle saghe norrene, ed. by Carla Falluomini. 229-265. Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Osro.
• Finazzi, Rosa Bianca & Paola Tornaghi. 2014. Gothica Bononiensia: A new document under linguistic and philological analysis. IJGLSA. 19.1-56.

As the length of the articles suggests, these are meaty, detailed analysis of the small amount of material found, including painstaking comparison to previously known Gothic material. The authors make the simple but important point that while one could before doubt how much of the bible had been translated into Gothic, we've now got evidence that at least a lot of the Old Testament was translated.

There's all kinds of stuff in there that specialists can go to town on — like new evidence for productivity of some prefixes (in the Italian article) — but I found it pretty striking that there is material is very relevant to Gothic phonology even, with new evidence on syllabification based on where line breaks are written, and hints on other matters, like a spelling for expected <ϸs>.

But above all, how tantalizing is it to think that the corpus of a language like Gothic is not actually closed …

Very nice!