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Gothic was a language spoken by the Goths, pertaining to the extinct Eastern branch of the Germanic languages. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and it is the only East Germanic language with a sizable text corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other languages such as Portuguese, Spanish and French. Like other Germanic languages, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any sizable texts, but it lacks any modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the 4th century. The language was in decline by the mid-6th century, partly because the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy and geographic isolation (in Spain the Gothic language lost its last and probably already declining function as a church language when the Visigoths converted to Catholicism in 589).〔''Strategies of Distinction: Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800'' (''Transformation of the Roman World'', vol. 2) by Walter Pohl, ISBN 90-04-10846-7 (pp. 119–121)〕 The language survived as a domestic language in the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) as late as the 8th century and, in the lower Danube area and in isolated mountain regions in Crimea, apparently as late as the early 9th century. Gothic-seeming terms found in later (post-9th century) manuscripts may or may not belong to the same language. The existence of such early attested texts makes it a language of considerable interest in comparative linguistics. ==History and evidence== Only a few documents in Gothic survive, not enough for completely reconstructing the language. That is especially true considering that most Gothic corpora are translations or glosses of other languages (namely, Greek), so foreign linguistic elements most certainly influenced the texts. These are the primary sources: * The largest body of surviving documentation consists of codices written and commissioned by the Arian bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila, 311–382), the leader of a community of Visigothic Christians in the Roman province of Moesia (modern Bulgaria/Romania). He commissioned a translation of the Greek Bible into the Gothic language, of which roughly three-quarters of the New Testament and some fragments of the Old Testament have survived. The Ulfilas translations are collected in the following codices: : *Codex Argenteus (Uppsala), including the Speyer fragment: 188 leaves. ::The best-preserved Gothic manuscript. Dating from the 6th century, it was preserved and transmitted by northern Ostrogoths in modern Italy. It contains a large part of the four Gospels. Since it is a translation from Greek, the language of the ''Codex Argenteus'' is replete with borrowed Greek words and Greek usages. The syntax in particular is often copied directly from the Greek. : *Codex Ambrosianus (Milan) and the Codex Taurinensis (Turin): Five parts, totaling 193 leaves. ::It contains scattered passages from the New Testament (including parts of the Gospels and the Epistles), of the Old Testament (Nehemiah), and some commentaries known as ''Skeireins''. It is, therefore, likely that the text had been somewhat modified by copyists. : *Codex Gissensis (Gießen): 1 leaf, fragments of Luke 23–24. It was found in Egypt in 1907 was but destroyed by water damage in 1945. : *Codex Carolinus (Wolfenbüttel): 4 leaves, fragments of Romans 11–15. : * Codex Vaticanus Latinus 5750: 3 leaves, pages 57/58, 59/60 and 61/62 of the ''Skeireins''. * A scattering of old documents: alphabets, calendars, glosses found in a number of manuscripts and a few runic inscriptions (between 3 and 13) that are known or suspected to be Gothic. Some scholars believe that these inscriptions are not at all Gothic.〔Braune/Ebbinghaus, ''Gotische Grammatik'', Tübingen 1981〕 * A small dictionary of more than eighty words and a song without translation, compiled by the Fleming Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador to the court of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul from 1555 to 1562, who was curious to find out about the language and by arrangement met two speakers of Crimean Gothic and listed the terms in his compilation ''Turkish Letters''. These terms date from nearly a millennium later than Ulfilas and are therefore not representative of his language. Busbecq's material also contains many puzzles and enigmas and is difficult to interpret in the light of comparative Germanic linguistics. There have been unsubstantiated reports of the discovery of other parts of Ulfilas' Bible. Heinrich May in 1968 claimed to have found in England 12 leaves of a palimpsest containing parts of the Gospel of Matthew. The claim was never substantiated. 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 about 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 that 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. Very few secondary sources make reference to the Gothic language after about 800. In ''De incrementis ecclesiae Christianae'' (840/2), Walafrid Strabo, a Frankish monk who lived in Swabia, speaks of a group of monks, who reported that "even now certain peoples in Scythia (Dobrudja), especially around Tomis spoke a ''sermo Theotiscus'' ('Germanic language'), the language of the Gothic translation of the Bible, and they used such a liturgy.〔 Alice L. Harting-Correa, "Walahfrid Strabo's libellus de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum. A translation and liturgical commentary", Leiden-New York-Köln: Brill, 1996 (ISBN 90 04 09669 8), pp. 72–73. Discussion between W. Haubrichs and S. Barnish in D. H. Green (2007), "Linguistic and Literary Traces of the Ostrogoths", ''The Ostrogoths from the Migration Period to the Sixth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective'', Sam J. Barnish and Federico Marazzi, eds., part of ''Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology'', Volume 7, Giorgio Ausenda, series ed. (Oxford: Boydell Press, ISBN 978-1-84383-074-0.), p. 409 and n1. 〕 In evaluating medieval texts that mention the Goths, many writers used the word ''Goths'' to mean any Germanic people in eastern Europe (such as the Varangians), 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. However, it is clear from Ulfilas' translation that despite some puzzles the language belongs with the Germanic language group, not with Slavonic. The relationship between the language of the Crimean Goths and Ulfilas's Gothic is less clear. The few fragments of Crimean Gothic from the 16th century show significant differences from the language of the Gothic Bible although some of the glosses, such as ''ada'' for "egg", could indicate a common heritage, and Gothic ''mena'' ("moon"), compared to Crimean Gothic ''mine'', can suggest an East Germanic connection. 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. The above list is not exhaustive, and a more extensive list is available on the website of the (Project ). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gothic language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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