NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution - Volume 71, Issue 2, 2018

The Codex Argenteus in Uppsala is the most comprehensive Gothic document still extant. Over the years, its various symbolic values have inspired several investigations and experiments, not only in the humanities, but also in the field of science and technology ranging from deciphering and reproducing the worn and corrupted script to solving riddles in the field of book history by analysing the materials that make up the codex. At the same time, new advanced techniques have been put to the test: woodcut carving, photography, spectral analysis, C-14 analysis and DNA testing. This paper provides a historical survey of techniques, investigations and even manipulations to which the Codex Argenteus has been subjected in the course of the last four centuries.

The aim of the present contribution is twofold. On the one hand we shall discuss the background of some Islamic legends about places and wondrous objects – holy relics of the past – that had once been in the possession of the Gothic monarchy by inheritance, but were subsequently lost or looted out of al-Andalus by the Muslim leaders. On the other hand our study is concerned with the relationship between the content of the legends in question and the “loss of Spain” in a more general sense, i.e. not only the loss of these objects by the Christian Goths subsequent to their loss of power in Spain, but also their disappearance from Muslim ownership. Besides, the legends possess a moral core, which is interesting in its own right: the way in which they are viewed in the Muslim sources, the locations and objects they describe, and their relationship to the Gothic monarchy may provide the modern reader with an insight into the striking vision of the past held by the invading Muslim culture.

The aim of this paper is to offer a descriptive analysis of the position of the verb in the recently discovered Gothic fragment of Bologna (Gothica Bononiensia) – a text that seems to be independent of Greek or Latin models – in order to highlight analogies to and differences from other Gothic texts. The analysis shows that the position of the verb is relatively free, both in main and in subordinate clauses, with some exceptions (negatives, wh-questions and imperatives). The text exhibits the coexistence of competing grammatical constructions, used to satisfy pragmatic and stylistic requirements.

By using Jakobson’s ( 1960 : 127–130) criteria for determining the nursery-word status of a given lexeme, I argue in this article that, even if we should no longer regard PG *aiþīn-/-ōn- ‘mother’ (Goth. aiþei), *aiþma- ‘daughter’s husband’ and *faþōn- ‘father’s sister’ as nursery words or hypocorisms ( Hansen 2017 : 207–220), we should certainly still do so for PG *ammōn- ‘parent’s mother; wet nurse’, *attan- ‘father’ (Goth. atta), *basōn- ‘father’s sister’ and *mōnōn-/mōmōn- ‘mother; mother’s sister’.

The present paper focuses on foreign names and loan words in the Gothic text corpus. The names are mostly Hebrew in origin but were transferred to Gothic through Greek. Their phonetic, phonological and graphemic adaption will be discussed in light of the close connection between the Wulfilian and Greek alphabets. In addition, we will raise the question and discuss whether some names are not fully adapted to the Gothic inflection but remain Greek in form, as well as why foreign words are sometimes not assigned to the inflectional class which would appear to be the most natural one.

For more than a millennium there have been reports testifying to the presence of Goths in the Crimea. However, until a few years ago, the only evidence of a Gothic or Germanic idiom spoken in the peninsula stems from the list of words recorded between 1560 and 1562 by Ogier de Busbecq. Significant new evidence, however, has become available through the recent discovery of five Gothic graffiti scratched on two reused fragments of a cornice belonging to the early Byzantine basilica at Mangup-Qale in the Crimea. The graffiti, datable to between about 850 and the end of the 10th century, exhibit words in Gothic known from Wulfila’s Bible translation, the script used being an archaic variant of Wulfila’s alphabet and the only specimen of this alphabet attested outside Pannonia and Italy. There would seem to be evidence for assuming that, among educated Crimean Goths, Gothic served as a spoken vernacular in a triglossic situation along with a purely literary type of Gothic and with Greek in the second half of the 9th century.

In the Germanic part of the epigram, Inter eils goticum scapia matzia ia drincan, preserved in Codex Salmasianus, it seems most reasonable to isolate scapia and gloss it as the 1st person sg. of the verb corresponding to Gothic skapjan ‘make’.

Intereilsgoticum scapiamatzia iadrincan

Non audet quisquam dignos edicere uersus.

Calliope madido trepidat se iungere Baccho,

Ne pedibus non stet ebria Musa suis.

Anthologia Latina 285

( Riese 1869 : 187) 1

It is worth emphasizing that it is not the generic Greek language which exerts Hellenizing influence on Gothic, but rather the Greek New Testament specifically. This is demonstrated by the consideration of unGreek features of the Greek New Testament, such as Semiticisms. This approach also resolves an anomalous usage of Gothic jabai, generally unexplained in grammars and dictionaries, and highlights a departure from the sense of the Greek in one passage.