The Gothic Language

This book is designed for students and scholars of the oldest known language, with a sizable data corpus belonging to the English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian language group. The Gothic Language is seminal to the history of the study of each of these languages. Gothic grammar is a standard text in courses on Indo-European and general linguistics, since Gothic serves as the prototype Germanic language in the study of comparative world language typologies. Particularly pan-Germanic is the innermost core of the grammar, the genetic phonology, which is reconstructed within the more recent approaches of Laryngeal and Glottalic Theories. Most challenging to traditionalist viewpoints is the total novel restructuring of Gothic synchronic phonology via current theoretical approaches such as underspecification theory and optimality theory. Underspecification, utilizing inheritance trees, also infuses the inflectional morphology, which admits a non-configurational syntax with verb-headed clauses. This book also brings the reader into the ambience of the fourth-century Goths. Readings from the Wulfilian bible, the extant eight pages of the Skeireins, together with a glossary, a bibliography and index, complete this volume.