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The Gothic language is the Germanic language with the earliest attestation (the 4th century), [219] [175] and the only East Germanic language documented in more than proper names, short phrases that survived in historical accounts, and loan-words in other languages, making it a language of great interest in comparative linguistics.
The language was in decline by the mid-sixth century, partly because of the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation (in Spain, the Gothic language lost its last and probably already declining function as a church language when the Visigoths converted from Arianism ...
Within medieval Germanic languages, the Goths are attested as Gotan (plural) in Old English and as Goti (singular) in Old Norse. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] A Germanic an -stem variant of the name, * Gutan- (Goth), is inferred from a genitive plural form gutani , found on the Pietroassa inscription and possibly equivalent to Biblical Gothic Gutanē , and from ...
The only East Germanic language of which texts are known is Gothic, although a word list and some short sentences survive from the debatedly-related Crimean Gothic. Other East Germanic languages include Vandalic and Burgundian , though the only remnants of these languages are in the form of isolated words and short phrases.
The Goths of late antiquity were considered most closely related to the Vandals and Gepids who, like the Goths, originally lived beyond the Carpathian Mountains. At least one classical author, Procopius, stated that these three peoples used the same Gothic language. This language is known by modern scholars to have been a Germanic language.
An important linguistic step was made by the Christian convert Ulfilas, who became a bishop to the Thervingi Goths in CE 341; he subsequently invented a Gothic alphabet and translated the scriptures from Greek into Gothic, creating a Gothic Bible, which is the earliest known translation of the Bible into a Germanic language. [21]
Goths were a minority in all the places they lived within the Roman empire, and no Gothic language or distinct Gothic ethnicity has survived. On the other hand, the Gothic language texts which the Ostrogothic kingdom helped preserve are the only eastern Germanic language with "continuous texts" surviving, and the earliest significant remnants ...
Geatish settlements during the 6th century, within the red lines. The green areas show the main areas of North Germanic settlement in Scandinavia.. The Geats (/ ɡ iː t s, ˈ ɡ eɪ ə t s, j æ t s / GHEETS, GAY-əts, YATS; [1] [2] Old English: gēatas [ˈjæɑtɑs]; Old Norse: gautar [ˈɡɑu̯tɑr]; Swedish: götar [ˈjø̂ːtar]), sometimes called Goths, [3] were a large North Germanic ...