Gothic language (redirected from Ulfilian Gothic)

Gothic language, dead language belonging to the now extinct East Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). Gothic has special value for the linguist because it was recorded several hundred years before the oldest surviving texts of all the other Germanic languages (except for a handful of earlier runic inscriptions in Old Norse). Thus it sheds light on an older stage of a Germanic language and on the development of Germanic languages in general. The earliest extant document in Gothic preserves part of a translation of the Bible made in the 4th cent. A.D. by Ulfilas, a Gothic bishop. This translation is written in an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, supposedly devised by the bishop himself, which was later discarded.

Bibliography

See J. Wright, Grammar of the Gothic Language and the Gospel of St. Mark (2d ed. 1954).

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Gothic language

Extinct Germanic language spoken by the Goths. Its records antedate those of other Germanic languages by about four centuries. Best known from a translation of the Bible into Gothic in AD 350, it died out among the Ostrogoths after the fall of their kingdom in Italy in the 6th century and among the Visigoths around the time of the Arab conquest in 711. It persisted longer in the Crimea, where a form of Gothic was spoken as late as the 16th century.