New Gothic manuscript ...

Back in the summer, I heard that a new Gothic text had been discovered and published in an Italian journal. The article is this: "Gothica Bononiensia: Analisi linguistica e filologica di un nuovo documento",  Aevum, 87 (2013), 113-155.

I raced to the library to see the materials only to find that the issue wasn't in. Still isn't. I finally ordered it through inter-library loan. In the meantime, key info is available online, with a transcription and black and white image here, a more newsy report including the image in this post here, and a pretty clearly annotated version here.

The basic story is that four pages of manuscript of an early (6th c.) version of Augustine's City of God are a palimpsest, a manuscript where old material was scraped off for use for a new manuscript. The underlying text turns out to be Gothic, mostly stuff that wasn't known before. It's not part of the Gothic Bible per se, but rather a collection of snippets from various books. A lot of the excitement is about the new words and word forms attested, like atdraga 'pull down' in the image. (The Gothic word has been colored to make it stand out.) We had at as a preposition and prefix and dragan, but not this word. A noun common in Germanic is the ancestor of maiden. A form magaþs was reconstructed for Gothic (e.g, in Lehmann's Gothic Etymological Dictionary) based on a derivationally related form found in the earlier corpus. It's now directly attested.

In glancing through the new material, nothing jumps out at me as phonologically or morphologically surprising, but one thing I haven't seen talked about is this: The little bits of Gothic we have are almost entirely from one book, the Codex Argenteus. That means we have precious little variation ... just a few differences within the manuscript. We don't know much of anything of substance about dialectal variation, historical change, etc. beyond that. But now we suddenly have a few parallel passages. Here's a bit of Luke 10:18 from the Codex:

 qaþ þan du im: gasaƕ Satanan swe lauhmunja driusandan us himina

Here's the form in the Bologna manuscript:

bi þanei f(rauj)a qaþ: sahv satanan swe lauhmunja dri[u]sandan us himina

The differences aren't too big -- just a slightly different formulation in the first clause. The Codex has '[he] said to them' and the second has 'the lord said'. But it's very cool that we now have some variation. Could be that this stuff is translated independently from Wulfila's version, using another source, but it could show us things about Gothic syntax.

Can't wait to see the full article and what specialists do with the new data.

Fun with Germanic historical linguistics ...

A normal mortal can only respond to that subject line with "fun ≠ Germanic historical linguistics", but Germanic historical linguists are not normal, I suppose. This blog has a tradition of historical linguistic geekery (start here and read from there). Time for an update ...

A crew of people  at the Universität Tübingen in Germany have assembled a pretty remarkable set of Merkverse for learning key bits of historical phonology and morphology of German and Germanic. A Merkvers can be translated as 'mnemonic rhyme' or something, but that doesn't do it justice ... there's a long tradition going back to the earliest writings in German of these little rhymes. (The image here, from here, is of one for the Runic alphabet.)

You really have to know German to get these, but one of the things you have to do with earlier Germanic languages is learn the series of strong verbs, seven classes from ride, rode, ridden and sing, sang, sung, and so on. Here's the one for that for Old High German (there's another one for Middle High German):

Althochdeutsche Merkwörter für die Ablautreihen

rîtan, zîhan, solcherlei —stehen in der ersten Reih'.
liogan und ziohan —schließt die zweite Reihe an.
Willst die Reihe drei du findan, —denk an werfan und an bindan.
neman, stelan, wissen wir, —passen nur in Reihe vier.
geban wird ganz ungeniert —in der Reihe fünf notiert.
graban, slahan, dies Gewaechs —kennen wir in Reihe sechs.
haltan und der Rest, Ihr Lieben, —hat redupliziert in sieben.

(aus Osnabrück?)

 If you're a student of the history of German, your life just got a little more fun.

And a big wag of the monk's habit to pr. (Or whatever you do with a monk's habit.)

Old Norse translations like you probably haven't thought about Old Norse translations

It's been quite a while since we trumpeted the übergeekish effort to put Star Wars into Old Norse (here, if you are the rare human being who doesn't have Tattúínárdœla Saga bookmarked.) That site is now up to new and equally innovative (though probably not as wildly popular!) work: They are providing translations of Eddic poems into the form they would have had when they were composed.

Wow.

More on language and migration: Ancient edition

Our last post was on how ancient migrations still leave traces in modern life — beyond language/dialect, but connected to it. Patterns of even more ancient migration are of course more controversial. This review of Peter Heather's new book from Discovery magazine's blog Gene Expression gives an overview of some of the controversies surrounding the Germanic Migrations.

The author objects to this point:

Many times within the text Peter Heather contends that the centuries long linguistic continuity of particular Germanic tribes … necessarily entails that the barbarians had to have brought women on their migrations.

The key is that Germanic languages clearly continued to be transmitted:

Someone with a better grasp of the details of sociolinguistics can enlighten us on the exact details of how language is transmitted, but I’m rather sure that women are not a necessary precondition for linguistic continuity.

I'll leave more detailed discussion to actual sociolinguists and historical linguists (I hope one of our contributors might actually read the book and report!), but these are interesting questions. Certainly a language can be maintained in some form under those conditions but that is typically a good situation for big restructuring — 'mixed' languages can be created, for instance. A community where the men are mostly speakers of one language and the women mostly speakers of another might be the kind of scenario that would lead to the structural differences that English shows from the rest of Germanic.


My point here is simply that somebody interested in socio-historical linguistics might want to look at Heather's book and see whether it opens the door to a fresh analysis of parts of Germanic history.

(Map from the fantastic University of Texas collection, here. Because I like old maps. Click to enlarge.)

New early runic inscription from Hogganvik, Norway: ek naudigastir

Just found out within the last hour that a very large Runic inscription has been found in Norway. It's from ca. 400 C.E. If so, that makes it a very old inscription and it's clearly one of the longest in the Elder Futhark, that is, the early form of the alphabet. The go-to source here looks like this blog (source of this picture too) for those who read Norwegian.

The inscription isn't very clear from the pictures (and Arkeologi i nord has a lot of them), but it apparently starts out eknaudigastir ... "I Naudigastir ...'. It's silly to speculate about even the meaning of the name (though I'm sorely tempted and can't stop my brain from trying). I don't think the morpheme naudi- is attested in other early inscriptions, for instance, though it's very familiar from Old Norse.

Here's hoping we'll soon know more.

A tip of the plastic horned viking helmet to RH.

Limburgs on the web!

The Limburgish Academy Foundation, or rather De Stiechting Limbörgse Academie, just announced www.limburgs.org. If you're interested in the Germanic languages, this is a pretty nifty development — extensive lexicon, tons of references, and on and on. I've poked around on the site some today, but barely scratched the surface.

This West Germanic variety has, it seems like, been grossly underappreciated by most specialists save for a small set. Here's your chance to get caught up.

— Joe, reporting from the Germanic languages desk at Team Verb