Gotesche Razde

[Ælfwine]

Gotesche Razde (Cyrillic: готэшэ раздэ /ˈɣotəʃə ˈrazdə/ alternatively Gothesche, Gothesch, Gotesch), hereon referred to primarily as "Gothic," is the last surviving Ostrogothic (East Germanic) language. It is spoken by approximately 4,000 people in the southern part of the Crimean peninsula, largely in the city of Doros (Mangup).

History made short, the Ostrogoths reportedly first settled the Crimean peninsula in the 3rd century AD. Likely they became subjects of the Roman Empire, and later the Byzantine Empire in the Principality of Theodoro. In the 8th century, John of Gothia led an unsuccessful revolt against the Khazars. Little is heard of them until Busbecq sought them out and recorded many words in their language. In our timeline, the language probably died out at the tail end of the 18th century, although it is possible it survived as a "Haussprache" until the mid-20th century. In this alternate history, I've altered history only so much to keep a handful of Goths alive until the present day, with numbers on par with the number of Tatars in Crimea. Likely during the 20th century they suffered from persecution and deportation by the USSR.

The Gothic phonemic inventory is quite modest, contrasting only 19 consonants and 11 vowels. It uses a Cyrillic alphabet inspired by Ukrainian and Russian.

Consonants:

/m n ŋ/ <м н нъ>
/p b t d k g/ <п б т д к ґ>
/f v θ s z ʃ x ɣ/ <ф в ѳ с з ш х г>
/r l/ <р л>

/ŋ/ and /ŋɣ/ marginally contrast: The former is typically written нъ while the latter is written нг. Otherwise, all phonemic values are written with as they are shown above. The reason for the orthography mimicking Ukrainian is until the last century Gothic lacked a proper /g/ phoneme, much like Ukrainian. Therefore, it was natural to write /ɣ/ as <г>. However, an increasing amount of loanwords had entered the language that facilitated the reintroduction of /g/, and therefore <ґ> was introduced for that purpose. Another interesting tidbit to take from the orthography is that Gothic is the only language to preserve the Cyrillic letter fita.

Vowels:

/i iː u uː/ <и ӣ у ӯ>
/e eː ə o oː/ <е е̄ э о о̄>
/a aː/ <а а̄>

Unfortunately the language isn't mature enough to create drawn out sentences (although I've briefly practiced with Ik büde þa wulf farwel some aspects of the conlang have changed since then.) Nonetheless I have been calquing many words and can give you a list of them, just as a small taste. Some of the words listed are directly from the corpus, others I've coined.

азэнс - autumn (PGmc *azaniz)
бро̄д - bread (PGmc *braudą)
брӯдэр - brother (PGmc *brōþēr)
ва̄зэр - marketplace (c.f. Middle Persian wʾčʾl, Hungarian vásár)
верс - man (PGmc *weraz, Old Norse verr)
фидэр - four (PGmc *fedwōr)
голѳ - gold (PGmc *gulþą)
кӣнс - woman (PGmc *kwēniz)
марс - horse (PGmc *marhaz)
мӣнэ - moon (PGmc *mēnô)
швартс - black (PGmc *swartaz)
швӣн - pig (PGmc *swīną)
хазэр - thousand (c.f. Middle Persian hcʾl)

NB: The fact that the macrons won't properly place themselves above the Cyrillic letters annoys me, but ah what can I do.

And that's all the work I can show for now. Hopefully my next post will be a detailed list of sound changes from Proto-Germanic, although the sleuths amongst you can probably figure out from the word list alone some of the changes.

[Nortaneous]

NB: The fact that the macrons won't properly place themselves above the Cyrillic letters annoys me, but ah what can I do.

Long vowels are usually written with doubled vowel characters in Cyrillic, so you could do that.

[Pabappa]

The macrons appear perfectly on mobile though, at least on my phone, which uses a sans serif font.

[Ælfwine]

NB: The fact that the macrons won't properly place themselves above the Cyrillic letters annoys me, but ah what can I do.

Long vowels are usually written with doubled vowel characters in Cyrillic, so you could do that.

Source? At least in Bering Aleut, Mansi, and Evenki long vowels are written using macrons (and macrons look the most appealing to me, although if one choice is more plausible than another, that is the one I will take.) Cyrillic seems to be less tolerant of diacritics than Latin or Greek alphabets, and it doesn't help that very few languages written in Cyrillic have phonemic vowel length. Heck, I could probably get away with not marking for vowel length at all. What I might end up doing is distinguishing vowel length in minimal pairs only, for example, let's say that оогэ "eye" and огэ (which could mean something else) constitutes a minimal pair, with the only distinction between the two is vowel length. Then the first would be marked with a double vowel or macron or whatever.

A short post on declensions for now (crossposted from the CBB):

Anyway, lets see some actual declensions. A very typical strong noun looks like this:

вулфс "wolf"

Code: Select all

	Sing.	Plural
Nom: 	вулфс 	вулфэс
Acc: 	вулф 	вулфэнс
Gen: 	вулфэс 	вулфэ

As you can see, the dative case is missing: it had been subsumed by the genitive case. This is quite similar to Modern Greek, which similarly lacks a dative case (although to be honest, I am not quite sure if Mariupol Greek shares the same state of affairs as Modern Greek, I can only assume it does.)

Weak nouns are typically more syncretic than strong nouns, although the amount of syncretism varies depending on the exact declension. For example, a neuter an-stem like огэ has the same plural form in -энэ, and shares a similar singular form in the nominative and accusative. Here is the weak an-stem огэ declined:

огэ "eye"

Code: Select all

	Sing.	Plural
Nom:	огэ	огэнэ
Acc:	огэ	огэнэ
Gen:	огэнс	огэнэ

Root nouns and other stems form a special class in Gothic. Most of them inflect quite similarly to other strong nouns, however there are a few irregular nouns to take note of. One of these such words, танѳс, is declined below:

танѳс "tooth"

Code: Select all

	Sing.	Plural
Nom.	танѳс	танѳэс
Acc.	танѳ	танѳэнс
Gen.	тунѳэс	тунѳэ

Much like how the interdental was preserved after an /l/ in words such as голѳ "gold," the dental was preserved after an /n/ in танѳс. In other Germanic languages, either the dental was lost (e.g. Old Norse tǫnn), or the nasal was lost (English tooth). Not only was the interdental preserved here, it was analogically extended from the nominative and accusative to the genitive, which initially had -д instead.

This is all I am going to share for today, as it takes me 30 minutes of my time alone to prepare such a small post, much more for a larger one.

[mèþru]

I know all Altaic languages (using it as a geographic designation) with vowel length in their orthographies use doubled vowels, whether Cyrillic or Latin.

Phonemic length in Southwest Slavic isn't marked orthographically except in dictionaries, which combine tone and length. Serbo-Croatian use macrons, graves and circumflexes for long vowels. Slovenian has two different systems for marking length: one pan-dialectal that doesn't mark tones (acute and circumflex) and one based on the Ljubljana dialect that does (acute and inverted breve).