East Germanic Languages
East Germanic languages represent an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family that was spoken by East Germanic tribes, including the Goths and Vandals. This group is unique among the three branches of Germanic languages—East, West, and North—as it has no surviving native speakers. The main tribes associated with East Germanic include the various Gothic tribes and the Vandals, with the most significant surviving example being the Gothic language. The Gothic language, primarily recorded through the work of Bishop Wulfila in the fourth century CE, was distinguished by its unique phonetic and grammatical characteristics compared to its North and West Germanic counterparts.
Written evidence of East Germanic includes fragments of the Bible translated into Gothic, which provides insight into the language's structure and the cultural context of the time. Although East Germanic ceased to be used in Europe around the tenth century, it lingered in the Crimean Peninsula until the sixteenth century. The extinction of East Germanic languages contrasts sharply with the flourishing of the other Germanic branches, which evolved into widely spoken modern languages such as English, German, and Swedish. This linguistic history offers a glimpse into the rich tapestry of human communication and cultural evolution across Europe.
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East Germanic Languages
The East Germanic languages are an extinct group of Indo-European languages spoken by the East Germanic tribes, including the Goths and Vandals. The three branches of the Germanic languages—East, West, and North—share a common linguistic ancestor called Proto-Germanic, used in Iron Age Scandinavia in the first millennium BCE. Of the three branches, East Germanic is the only extinct branch. A language is classified as extinct when it has no native speakers.
The tribes that are believed to have used East Germanic include the Gothic tribes (Crimean Goths, Gepids, Greuthungi, Ostrogoths, Thervingi, and Visigoths) the Vandals, the Bastarnae and Burgundians, the Heruli, Rugii, Scirii, and the Silingi. In the past, some linguists also included the Langobards, but their language is now generally considered closer to West Germanic.
History and Classification
Researchers believe that the writing on a bronze helmet dating from about the first or second century BCE might be the oldest known form of Germanic. The earliest definitive examples of Germanic language have been found in writings dating to the time of Julius Caesar in the first century BCE. That same century, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote a history of the Germanic peoples called the Germania.
An early form of a Germanic alphabet dates from about the same era. The script was borrowed from the Etruscans, precursors to the Romans, and adapted to accommodate different vocal patterns in Germanic words. The characters were reshaped to make them easier to inscribe on the bark the Germanic tribes used to record their writing.
Written accounts of the time, archaeological evidence, and various place names suggest the East Germanic people originated in Scandinavia and migrated through Poland into nearby areas.
The only known example of an East Germanic language is a Gothic text from the fourth century CE. Bishop Wulfila, a Goth clergyman born of Greek parents, was tasked with helping in the conversion of the Goths to Christianity. Wulfila created a new alphabet to translate a copy of the Bible into Gothic. He used primarily Greek symbols but incorporated some elements of Latin and an ancient runic script.
The original Bible was lost, but a fragmented copy of it survived in a sixth-century manuscript from northern Italy called the Codex Argenteus,or Silver Book,so named because of the book’s silver binding. This document contains a small section of the Old Testament and larger portions of the New Testament.
Other surviving works in Gothic are rare. The best known of these are fragments of a commentary on the Gospel of John known as the Skeireins—Gothic for "explanation"—and the Codex Ambrosianus, translated biblical fragments. Other surviving examples of the Gothic language include a piece of a calendar, two deeds containing some Gothic sentences, a tenth-century manuscript with the Gothic alphabet, and a few other examples of Gothic words and translations.
East Germanic, as exemplified by the surviving examples of Gothic, displays several key differences from the North and West Germanic languages. A number of these are related to the way words were pronounced. For example, some initial consonant clusters, such as the pl cluster, exist only in East Germanic; the other Germanic languages used an fl cluster. In Gothic, double consonant combinations such as jj and ww, were "sharpened" to sound like the letters d and g, while in other Germanic tongues they were run together more like English combines the u and e in "true." In other Germanic languages, the letter z was changed to the letter r, but Gothic provides evidence that the East Germanic tribes maintained the z, a linguistic trait known as rhoticism, or the substitution of another character for the letter r.
There were differences between the grammar in East Germanic and the other Germanic languages as well. Nouns and adjectives had gender, and some masculine nouns ended with az to indicate the singular masculine form. This did not happen in other Germanic languages. The use of reduplication, or repetition of the initial syllable of verbs, also differentiated East Germanic from the other Germanic tongues. Another difference was the use of an alternate ending to the verb to indicate the passive voice, as opposed to using a past participle of the verb plus an auxiliary verb, as in other Germanic languages.
Geographic Distribution and Modern Usage
Use of the Gothic language and East Germanic seems to have ceased in Europe near the tenth century. The language survived for a few more centuries in the Crimean region near the Black Sea in modern-day Ukraine, but the last record of its use dates from the sixteenth century.
Although only copied fragments of Wulfila’s Bible remain, it provides insight into how biblical texts were viewed and interpreted during the fourth to sixth centuries CE. This gives researchers not only an example of the theology of the time, but also the literary forms and styles in addition to capturing one of the few remaining samples of East Germanic linguistics.
While the East Germanic branch of the Germanic language died out, the other branches evolved into some of the world’s most spoken modern languages. North Germanic eventually became Danish, Swedish, and Norse, while West Germanic is the descendent of modern Dutch, German, and English.
Bibliography
"About the Gothic Language." Project Wulfila. University of Antwerp, Belgium, n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2015. <http://www.wulfila.be/gothic/gotica/>.
Barber, Charles, Joan Beal, and Philip Shaw. The English Language. New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. 87–96. Print.
Shay, Scott. The History of English: A Linguistic Introduction. San Francisco: Wardja, 2008. 47–56. Print.
"Gothic Alphabet." Omniglot. Omniglot, n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2015. <http://www.omniglot.com/writing/gothic.htm>.
Sohrman, Ingmar. "What Is Visigothic and What Is Frankish in Medieval and Later Spanish?" Early Germanic Languages in Contact. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2015. 125–35. Print.
Strazny, Phillipp. Encyclopedia of Linguistics. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011. 513. Print.