Today we're gonna talk about
the oldest written Germanic language A language that was once spoken from Spain to Crimea A language that now has vanished
without leaving any descendants "Hails", my name is Julie
and welcome to the Gothic language The Goths No, not these goths but these ones Goths once ruled half of Europe, but now all we have remaining from them is an architecture style and a subculture And none of this is even connected to the actual Goths This is a map of Europe in 500 AD just 24 years after Rome was once again sacked by the Goths and this time they even replaced the emperor by a Goth king All this was at this time ruled by the Goths But where are they now?
And who were they anyways? Goths were East Germanic people speaking East Germanic languages that are related to other Germanic languages like well German or Norwegian or English but are not their ancestors or descendants
but more like cousins In fact, all East Germanic languages are now extinct languages It seems it was starting off great for them until
something went very wrong But Goths have actually a much longer history than just dominating the agonizing remnants of the Roman Empire so let's start from the times more ancient For example, let's see Europe 4500 years ago, exactly the time when Indo-Europeans were spreading all over the place and while doing that dividing into different families Those Indo-Europeans who went North and into Scandinavia later became Proto-Germanic people They stayed in southern Scandinavia for a bit,
things were going well for them so throughout the 1st millenia BC they started slowly but steadily expanding back south Celts move aside Suddenly they found themselves
at the border of the Roman Empire That is also the time in history that Romans used to call
"the era of Barbarian invasions" What an interesting coincidence On this Roman map of 125 AD we see Gothones in Poland They continued moving south and by mid 3rd century they occupied a large area north and west of the Black Sea During this period Goths highly interacted with
the Roman Empire either by raiding it or getting recruited into Roman army participating in Roman politics and
migrating into Roman territories The interaction was so tight that in the 4th century
Goths converted to Christianity And everything might have stayed that way but
the Wind of Change came from the East The Huns pushed the Goths, and the Goths
pushed into the Roman Empire By that time Goths split into two main groups: East and West,
or Ostrogoths and Visigoths Visigoths left their territories in Dacia and wandered around searching for a place to settle They wandered around quite a bit They went to the Balkans, to Italy,
sacking Rome on the way and in the 5th century ending up in southern France and Spain The Ostrogoths left their lands in modern-day Ukraine and also moved West, first to Central Europe around Hungary and then following a well-known trail: went to the Balkans,
then to Italy, sacked Rome and in 476 ended the rule of the Western Roman emperors which in history is considered to be the year
of the fall of the Roman Empire Of course the Ostrogoths didn't think that
they brought fall to anything because technically the Roman Emperor was still around
just sitting in Constantinople The 6th century was a state of constant war in Italy Ostrogoths were pushed by the Byzantines from the sea and by the Lombards, a West Germanic tribe, from the North After years of battling they got dissolved in these events
and we don't hear about them anymore after the 6th century We see a very similar scenario in Spain Pushed by the Franks to the North and the Arabs to the South
the Visigoth kingdoms disappear around the 8th century And that's how the Goths vanished into history However in the 16th century a Flemish diplomat whose name I'm not even gonna try to pronounce Traveled to Crimea and wrote down a list of words in an unknown language he heard there but which sounded suspiciously familiar to his Germanic ear This was the last surviving descendant of Gothic spoken in some isolated areas of Crimea possibly up until the 18th century Since then it seems nobody spoke Gothic anymore However even today whenever you hear about
Spanish "tapas" or Slavic "hleb" know that those are the words that stem
from the history of Goths We're just lucky that they left some texts behind otherwise we wouldn't know much about their language And just as a side note if you want to pick what language you want to learn about then check out my Patreon and vote for the next language As with so many languages around the world
the writing system of Gothic was created in order to better spread the message of God The key character in the story is Wulfila He lived in the 4th century, born of Anatolian parents
captured by the Goths So he had knowledge of both Greek and Gothic and also Latin He became a bishop and started preaching to the Visigoths
the Aryan version of Christianity He and his team developed the Gothic alphabet
and translated the Bible Today the main source of the Gothic language is the Codex Argenteus or the Silver Bible It is a beautiful copy of Wulfila's Bible probably made for the
Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great in the 6th century 188 pages of the book survive and after centuries of adventures and traveling from one part of Europe to another It ended up in Uppsala, Sweden Other surviving texts from from the Goths are also
various fragments of the Bible Even this graffiti in Crimea from 9th-10th century
features quotes from Psalms From all these findings linguists could
reconstruct 3104 Gothic words The alphabet developed by Wulfila
reminds the Greek alphabet It has the same number of letters and most of the letters bear a strong resemblance to Greek By the way, the numbers are there because the letters were also used as numerals indicated by a stroke on top of them same as in Greek It is considered that Wulfila made a mix
out of three writing systems Either he based his alphabet on Greek with input
from runic and Latin either it's the other way, he based it on runic
with input from Greek and Latin Yes, prior to adopting the new alphabet
Goths were using the runes So now we should explain what are the runes Runes are basically an alphabet used by Germanic people before switching to Gothic or Latin alphabets We don't know where the runes come from but probably they were adaptations of Etruscan or old Latin alphabets The earliest runic inscription dates from 150 AD We don't have much remaining from
the runic inscriptions in Gothic a ring, a spear, another spear and couple of other objects Most of the letters of the Gothic alphabet
do have a Greek equivalent Origins of some letters are not really known The letter "uuaer" might have come from the runes And we don't even know the sounds of the letters 90 and 900 since we didn't encounter them in texts much Also some letters are clearly from Latin like the "quertra" corresponding to the Q and "haal" corresponding to the H The Gothic vowers can be long or short Just like in Greek or Latin they didn't bother indicating it Now it would be the perfect time to listen
to the native speakers but unfortunately in this case, we are
several hundred years late But if you do want to listen to Gothic, I recommend this
poem written by Tolkien, can you believe that The link to the full video is in the description The poem sounds interesting and beautiful so check it out After this video of course Gothic was a synthetic language meaning
everything was conjugating like crazy and the word order was either SOV or SVO or it was just free It's not really clear as all sentence examples are from the Bible which is obviously quite a poetic text Talking about sentences, let's see one "Yah Faifalth thos bokos"
"And he closed those books" It is a slightly weird wording, I know but it comes from the Bible again so anyways First, we see that the subject "he" is omitted Gothic could drop the pronouns if they were obvious like Spanish or Italian do for example but which is not that common in Germanic languages Also pronouns can have three numbers: singular, plural or dual but only in first or second person Back in the sentence, "thos bokos" are in accusative and this is the moment when I show
this crazy declension table Basically, nouns, pronouns and adjectives change endings depending on their role in the sentence Here the noun "book" - "boka" - is in plural and it is a direct object so it becomes in accusative Finally, the verb It also changes endings and that's another
crazy table to illustrate it Interestingly, Gothic didn't have Future tense which
developed in other Germanic languages Actually Gothic came quite far from them since East Germanic was the first one to split from the Proto-Germanic Here's another difference: Gothic didn't have any articles While other Germanic languages developed a
definite and an indefinite article There is only one question left unanswered We found out who were the Goths
and where they came from more or less But then, who are these guys? Well, that's not really the subject of this video
so I'll try to explain it very briefly Late Middle Ages Medieval cathedrals getting taller and more ornate Renaissance Rediscovering Greek and Roman architecture, thinking Oh this is perfect! So different from what we're building now Medieval architecture is so anti-Roman,
it's what destroyed the Roman Like the Goths that destroyed the Roman Empire,
so this anti-Roman architecture is Gothic too Romanticism is here Rediscovering Medieval architecture this time, thinking Oh these Middle Ages have such a mysterious vibe How do they call this architecture? Oh it's Gothic, I like it They call this periods the Dark Ages, and you know what? We like the dark, let's make it even darker,
it's even nicer that way Gothic literature and movies flourishing
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries The 70s come The gothic genre aesthetics enters
music and influences subculture with its inspiration of the Middle Ages and
the poetisation of the dark side That's a long way from those guys to these But it's fun to see how words and concepts
travel through time and evolve Makes you think about the eternity and the vanity of this world where everything will eventually turn into ashes and
darkness and death Thank you so much for watching
and see you in our next exploration...
