Goths – Human Pachyderms?

Not exactly a hook that.

You kind of have to sell your soul to make AI art, what with its mass theft and enormous carbon footprint, but there it is. A better picture would’ve stolen from more artists and produced an even greater carbon dioxide crater, so I’m not going to hold out for one.

My previous post was about a forgotten order of early Cenozoic herbivores living just after the K-T Event which nowadays can be seen as a footnote in the history of life, but like anything else used to be a whole group of mammals whose lives meant something for millions of years. However, they didn’t fit into people’s narratives and they were in a way a failure, so nobody thinks about them. That was an example from prehistory. Although the reconstructions I posted were all furry, they might also be seen as pachyderms. The idea of pachyderms is not reflected in genetic reality – elephants, hippos and rhinos are not closely related at all – the possible “natural kind” which is described by the word could include the pantodonts. This brings up the issue of cladism not being the only way to think of organisms. Right now, the idea of genetic relationships has become very important in biology with unexpected conglomerations of species being lumped together as related, which they are, and others rendered asunder despite their remarkable similarities, and this is all fine but it fails to take into account a different, er, kind of natural kind. In a very real sense, numbats, echidnas, anteaters, aardvarks and pangolins are similar to each other despite the fact that they are only very distantly related to each other, and there is clearly another universe of similarities between organisms which has little to do with genetics but is nevertheless as real in a different way. In this respect, pantodonts have significant similarities with hippos and rhinos despite not being at all closely related. They’re pachyderms.

Is it going too far to find an analogous similarity with all the different Goths? The original Goths were an East Germanic tribe of late antiquity instrumental in the fall of Rome who went on to found a kingdom in what would become Spain and to be absorbed by Byzantium. Later on, because they were associated with the supplanting of Roman culture, certain cultural tendencies in mediaeval Europe became labelled as Gothic, such as perpendicular-like architecture and the oddly similar style of calligraphy in Latin script found today in the occasional newspaper banner. This was later adapted again to refer to a genre of literature set in such environments, and later still to a subculture which seemed to copy those elements in turn. Thus today a goth is someone who stereotypically dresses in black and silver and wears very pale makeup with black hair and this seems very far indeed from the original Goths. It’s remarkable how extreme the semantic drift is here.

My focus, though, is on the “original” Goths, and here I have a personal story which I’ll come to. The Germanic tribes in general developed in southern peninsular Scandinavia and proceeded to move into the rest of Europe and beyond in waves. The first of these led to the tribes of Germania, as the Romans called it. This was followed by the East Germanic tribes, including the Goths, Burgundians and Vandals, towards the end of the Imperial era, and of course it was Alaric the Goth who led the sack of Rome. It’s been commented that by that point, the horde outside the gates of Rome spoke a more highly inflected language than those inside it. It’s tempting to think that the rot set in when Latin abandoned the ablative case and the inflected pluperfect, but that’s not only silly but has almost Nazi overtones, so I won’t go there.

I actually know remarkably little about the Goths. I think of them partly as terrestrial Vikings, as it were. Their material culture reminds me of the kind of grave goods and jewellery found among the Norse people and the West Germanic tribes as in the Sutton Hoo burial site, and they’re clearly of the same ilk as the English before the Norman Conquest. They are the same kind of people as we are. Although this has potentially racist connotations and is all the more so because they were sort of Nordic, in one particular respect this has particular value to me, and this is where I recount the personal story.

I usually say the Lord’s Prayer in church in Gothic. This sounds like pretentious and ostentatious, but I have good reason for doing it. We were asked to say the Lord’s Prayer “in whatever language lies closest to your heart”, and for me that language is Gothic. As you may know, I almost immediately, in 21st century parlance, “deconstructed” my faith after conversion on 23rd October 1985. The fact that I can pinpoint a date tells you something about what kind of Christian I am, or at least was at that time. Ironically, my later experience of postgraduate philosophy and introduction to postmodernity was years away at the time, and when I wrestled with the general concept later I found it annoying. Nonetheless, that’s how what I did would be described today. I reacted rather violently against my faith, among other things, due to its homophobia, sexism, intolerance of other expressions of religious faith and the fact that it was often used as a substitute for morality and a way of avoiding accountability.

However, we’re all more than our faith and I myself am particularly interested in language. To make a possibly annoyingly Christian comment about my life as reinterpreted by someone who did come back to the faith after twelve years, God didn’t leave me alone. I belonged to God and God pursued me. This is of course post hoc rationalisation to some extent. Anyway, Gothic is a particularly interesting language to me because it’s both ancient and closely related to English. There are two sizeable documents in the Gothic language along with some traces in modern languages, notably the Castilian “tapas”, cognate with the word “top”, and “Catalonia”, which may be derived from “Gothland” or something similar. These are the Codex Argenteus, which is a translation of the Bible, and the Skeireins, which is a commentary on the Gospel of John and may be written by a non-native speaker. I haven’t read a single word of the latter, but the former is another matter.

I’ve always been interested in languages. I think I can say that honestly because as a member of a language-oriented species, I’ve been receptive to language since probably shortly after I developed the ability to hear. As such, this makes me unremarkable, so it’s worth rewording this as something like “I seem to be more interested in language than most people”. Anyway, Gothic particularly interests me because it’s an almost unique example of a well-attested language which is both Germanic and therefore related to English, and ancient. The other example of this consists of what I call “Runic”, i.e. the language written in the Elder Futhark before Germanic separated into West and North Germanic, but that consists of short inscriptions, even single words, on objects such as bones and swords, mainly curses and evocations. It doesn’t have the extensive corpus of the Gothic language. Since the only real texts from Gothic are Biblical, when I became interested in it I only had that to read. I took a copy of the Codex Argenteus from the university library down to the photocopier and went through the whole lot, ending up with a massive wodge of papers with the whole text on it. This was in the days before the internet became widely available to the general public and I had no money except to feed the photocopier, so it was the only option really.

You might now expect some story of a miraculous return to “the Lord” to happen at this point, but that isn’t exactly what happened. No, in fact I just read a familiar text in an unfamiliar language and gradually picked it up. That said, the more familiar texts from the gospels were easily recognisable and I began to notice how Gothic provided a much firmer bridge between English and the early Church than modern translations of the Bible into English. The classic King James Version dates from 1611. From previous studies, I picked up some Old English passages such as the story of Abraham and Isaac, the parable of the wise and foolish men and the Lord’s Prayer, and actually I’m still puzzled by those because I thought the Church didn’t allow translations into the vernacular in the early Middle Ages, so even now I don’t know why those exist, but the Gothic translation is special because it provides a particularly clear window into the early manuscripts without the barrier of a particularly foreign language like New Testament Greek. That said, it’s a gloss more than a translation, being an almost word for word oversetting of the Greek rather than an attempt to be more idiomatic, although it also isn’t clear that that’s what it is because so little Gothic text survives in any other form. Gothic itself also seems to have borrowed a lot from Greek, including the rather similar alphabet, which is therefore quite easy to read. Even today I find that certain passages from the Bible, particularly the Sermon On The Mount, come to me first in Gothic rather than English. I’m not being pretentious here: it’s just a quirk of my brain and a fact of my life.

Hence when I was exhorted to say the Lord’s Prayer in the language closest to my heart, I opted to say it in Gothic. Gothic was, in a sense, the language God used to speak to me when I was still on the run from the Christian faith. It was the language God called out to me in when I didn’t want to hear, and though nobody has spoken it as a first language for centuries, for me it’s a living language.

The Goths were the first Christianised Germanic tribe, although “Christianised” might be used loosely here. In the fourth Christian century, Arian Christians in the Roman Empire proselytised to the Goths and this led quickly to conversion and the bishop I refer to as Wulfila but whom is more often called Ulfilas made his translation. It’s on bright red vellum, and remarkably for an ancient document is actually printed! This was achieved by using stamps for each letter and something like silver leaf to emboss the text onto the page. There were doubtless many other versions of the Bible in Gothic but this, the Codex Argenteus, is the best preserved and most complete and well-known. “Wulfila” means “wolf-cub”: “wulfs” plus the diminutive “-ila” as found in the English “-let” and “little”. I don’t know why he was called that but it does somehow seem very stereotypically Germanic.

The Goths, then, were Christian at a time when all other Germanic tribes were still heathen, including the precursors of the English. This was two centuries before Queen Bertha of Kent had a Romano-British building renovated to become the first church in the English speaking world, about twenty years before Augustine reached here. There are apparently older Celtic churches. Wulfila omitted both books of Kings from his translation because he thought the Goths were already belligerent enough and shouldn’t be encouraged to be more so by a sacred text. I find this odd because there’s so much war and fighting elsewhere in the Tanakh, and it’s also interesting because it suggests that the idea of the canon was more flexible at the time than I would’ve expected nowadays.

I’ve said that the Goths were Arian Christians. Like “Arminian”, this is a rather unfortunate word, particularly when applied to a Germanic people because of the later association between the Nazis and the so-called “Aryans”. It’s nothing to do with that. No mainstream Christian denomination believes in Arianism today although the Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses have been described as such. Arianism is, as I understand it, the belief that Christ is made as well as begotten. If you’re familiar with the Nicene Creed, you’ll be aware that one of the things we say we believe in it is that Christ is “begotten, not made”. This is because of that controversy in the early Church. It’s more complicated than that though, because apparently there’s also an issue with time which I don’t really get but it’s something like God begetting Christ before creation but still in time or something. The problem is that it would mean there is no ontological Trinity. So the question with the Gothic Bible in this respect is, is there anything in that translation which either leads to that perception or motivated Wulfila in the first place when he translated it? Beyond that, there’s also the fact that it is actually in a vernacular language, and I don’t know much about Church history but this appears to mean that there was at least some variety of the faith which was perfectly willing to allow the literate portion of the population to read the Bible in their own language. There are other examples of course, notably New Testament Greek itself and also Syriac and Coptic. So far as I can tell though, there seems to be no Arian leaning in the translation. I imagine this is because Arianism emerges in the exegesis (“skeireins”!) of the text rather than it being specifically present in the text itself. It’s open to interpretation and that’s where they went with it.

My approach to the Bible is that God speaks to me most clearly through it because of its history in our culture leading to it being held in reverence rather than it necessarily being a particularly protected text. A note to the “milkman” could speak to us if that’s what God chooses to do and we’re receptive to that. As such, the resonance of the Gothic version is particularly strong to me because it’s so close to both the foundation of the faith and the English language. I do also believe that each language, and probably each translation in each language, brings different things out and this applies to this version too. Incidentally, this isn’t always a good thing: the way the KJV is translated seems to focus excessively on witchcraft and the Jehovah’s Witness New World Translation attempts to portray the Holy Spirit as non-existent. In the case of the Codex Argenteus, one notable feature of the Gothic language in particular comes to mind. Gothic, along with other older Germanic languages, retains the reduplicative class of strong verbs. Strong verbs are those Germanic verbs whose stem vowel tends to change with conjugation, as with the English words “come” and “drive”. Although only the word “hight” does it in Modern English, there is a class of strong verbs which also repeats the root syllable in the past tense. Old English had a couple but even back then they were marginal. Old Norse has a couple more, including the words for “row” and “sow”, although these were obscured by that tongue’s trend to change “S” and “Z” to “R”, meaning that “sow” simply looks like a verb with an unusual R in the past tense because it rhymes with “row”. By contrast, Gothic has a whole load of proper reduplicative verbs used properly in the Codex Argenteus.

It’s easy to perceive patterns where there are none, but in Gothic’s case I really do think there’s a pattern in the case of the Gothic reduplicative verbs. These include the verbs corresponding to “call” (as in English “hey” becoming “hight”), “sleep”, “let”, “sew” and “sow”. Although these verbs are preserved to some extent, even in Gothic they were starting to break down, replacing the reduplication with a prefix. However, they include the verbs cognate with “blend”, “fold”, “hold”, “pray”, “salt”, “wield”, “fang”, “hang”, “hey”, “lake” (meaning “play” in English but “jump” in Gothic), “sleep”, “let”, “sow”, “sew”, “blast”, “leap”, “greet” (as in “weep”) and “touch”. It’s easy to read things into this but there seems to be a kind of repetitive element to each of these verbs, so for example sleeping can feature repeating snoring or sighing, folding results in a series of layers, greeting is akin to the repetitive act of sobbing and so on. Similarly, salting involves a single act of sprinkling many grains of salt onto something, each falling grain representing a small and similar event, and akin to this, sowing seeds involves the repeated broadcasting of grains onto soil.

Here’s an illustration of how I think reduplicative verbs shed light on Scripture.

The Parable of the Sower is generally understood to concern the reception of the gospel by potential Christians. There is a doctrine in some versions of Protestantism called the Perseverance of the Saints, which is the idea that once you are saved, you can never lose your salvation. This tends to be used against apostates (people who’ve lost their faith) to say that they can’t really have been Christian in the first place, thereby, as in many other situations, purporting to be telepathic. This doctrine can be used against fundamentalism in a way which it seldom is: it effectively means that “ex-Christians” who have lost their faith are still Christian and saved from the perspective of Christians who still believe this doctrine. My own experience of conversion, as I understood it at the time, was that it was a one time thing. However, considering the emphatically repetitive nature of hearing the Good News as expressed in the Gothic translation of the Parable of the Sower, although it’s slightly different in apparent intent, to me at least it brings to mind another common idea which in many Christians’ minds has superceded the idea of the Perseverance of the Saints, that salvation is an ongoing and repetitive process which isn’t just finished in one go with repentance and commitment to Christ.

This is one example.

Here is the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic:

𐌰𐍄𐍄𐌰 𐌿𐌽𐍃𐌰𐍂, 𐌸𐌿 𐌹𐌽 𐌷𐌹𐌼𐌹𐌽𐌰𐌼,𐍅𐌴𐌹𐌷𐌽𐌰𐌹 𐌽𐌰𐌼𐍉 𐌸𐌴𐌹𐌽,𐌵𐌹𐌼𐌰𐌹 𐌸𐌹𐌿𐌳𐌹𐌽𐌰𐍃𐍃𐌿𐍃 𐌸𐌴𐌹𐌽𐍃,𐍅𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌸𐌰𐌹 𐍅𐌹𐌻𐌾𐌰 𐌸𐌴𐌹𐌽𐍃,𐍃𐍅𐌴 𐌹𐌽 𐌷𐌹𐌼𐌹𐌽𐌰 𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌰𐌽𐌰 𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌸𐌰𐌹.𐌷𐌻𐌰𐌹𐍆 𐌿𐌽𐍃𐌰𐍂𐌰𐌽𐌰 𐌸𐌰𐌽𐌰 𐍃𐌹𐌽𐍄𐌴𐌹𐌽𐌰𐌽 𐌲𐌹𐍆 𐌿𐌽𐍃 𐌷𐌹𐌼𐌼𐌰 𐌳𐌰𐌲𐌰,𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌰𐍆𐌻𐌴𐍄 𐌿𐌽𐍃 𐌸𐌰𐍄𐌴𐌹 𐍃𐌺𐌿𐌻𐌰𐌽𐍃 𐍃𐌹𐌾𐌰𐌹𐌼𐌰,𐍃𐍅𐌰𐍃𐍅𐌴 𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐍅𐌴𐌹𐍃 𐌰𐍆𐌻𐌴𐍄𐌰𐌼 𐌸𐌰𐌹𐌼 𐍃𐌺𐌿𐌻𐌰𐌼 𐌿𐌽𐍃𐌰𐍂𐌰𐌹𐌼,𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌽𐌹 𐌱𐍂𐌹𐌲𐌲𐌰𐌹𐍃 𐌿𐌽𐍃 𐌹𐌽 𐍆𐍂𐌰𐌹𐍃𐍄𐌿𐌱𐌽𐌾𐌰𐌹,𐌰𐌺 𐌻𐌰𐌿𐍃𐌴𐌹 𐌿𐌽𐍃 𐌰𐍆 𐌸𐌰𐌼𐌼𐌰 𐌿𐌱𐌹𐌻𐌹𐌽; 𐌿𐌽𐍄𐌴 𐌸𐌴𐌹𐌽𐌰 𐌹𐍃𐍄 𐌸𐌹𐌿𐌳𐌰𐌽𐌲𐌰𐍂𐌳𐌹𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐌼𐌰𐌷𐍄𐍃 𐌾𐌰𐌷 𐍅𐌿𐌻𐌸𐌿𐍃 𐌹𐌽 𐌰𐌹𐍅𐌹𐌽𐍃. 𐌰𐌼𐌴𐌽.

And transliterated into Latin script:

Atta unsar, þu in himinam,weihnai namo þein,qimai þiudinassus þeins,wairþai wilja þeins,swe in himina jah ana airþai.Hlaif unsarana þana sinteinan gif uns himma daga,jah aflet uns þatei skulans sijaima,swaswe jah weis afletam þaim skulam unsaraim,jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai,ak lausei uns af þamma ubilin; unte þeina ist þiudangardijah mahts jah wulþus in aiwins. Amen.

It isn’t hugely divergent from the KJV, but there are a few notable deviations. For a start, just on a technical note which probably has no significant, it starts with “Our Father, Thou in Heaven”, which translated word-for-word seems a bit odd to English ears. The really divergent bit, which tends to throw me when I say it, comes at “give us this day our daily bread”, because in Gothic the word “sinteinan”, which appears to be redundant, appears out of nowhere. It means “daily” and seems to have no cognate in English. One very different set of words occurs in “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”, which in Gothic reads “jah aflet uns þatei skulans sijaima, swaswe jah weis afletam þaim skulam unsaraim.” This has strayed somewhat from the Greek and reads something like “and let off those of us who engage in skullduggery we be as also we let off them our skullduggery-doers”. One alternate translation of that line into English reads something like “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”, but it seems that the Goths, being an initially nomadic people, wouldn’t have been able to grasp the analogy with being monetarily in debt and instead understood it in terms of simply suffering wrong from and doing wrong to others. The general idea works absolutely fine even in an apparently moneyless society, or at least one where money is less important than it was for the Greeks and Romans at the time, which sadly means that money is not the root of all evil – people can still behave badly even though it doesn’t exist in their society.

I don’t want to pretend that Gothic gives me personally a special insight into the Bible. It isn’t special at all in some senses. For a start, thousands of people used Gothic as a first language. I also presume that most of them were illiterate and that they were at most having it read to them. Several of the letters in the alphabet were adapted runes though, so literacy in some form had already come to be before the Bible was first written down in the language. Another question I don’t know the answer to is whether the common people would’ve heard the Bible read to them, in Gothic or otherwise. It may not be the same as in the traditions leading to the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, and the position of the Gothic church with respect to mainstream Christianity may be analogous to the Coptic church. Even so, many people must’ve read the Bible in Gothic and gleaned certain insights from it slanted by the use of that particular language, and I have no idea if what I’ve mentioned above forms part of that, but it may have done and if that’s so, this is just stuff that’s re-occurring to me. The Goths are an entirely extinct, dead people, and most of the insights and probably prejudices they acquired are completely lost. The Skeireins itself may be of some help here, but as I’ve said I haven’t actually read it.

The fact that today’s world is devoid of Gothery of that kind means that all we really have is absence and mystery. The same is, incidentally, true of the etymologically related Jutes who settled in Kent after the fall of Rome, and appear to have suffered a genocide. All that seems to be left of that today is the division between Maids Of Kent and Kentish Maids, one referring to the Jutish part of the Kentish kingdom and the other to the, well, English part I suppose is one way of putting it. Once again I find myself thinking of Regina Spektor’s ‘Samson’ – “the history books forgot about us and the Bible didn’t mention us, not even once”. This applies to the Goths as much as it does the pantodonts.

However, we do feel the absence of the Goths quite keenly in a way, as shown by the wandering of the concept all over our culture right up to the present day. I’m not sure when this started, but it’s worth mentioning that they didn’t just vanish without trace. There was a Visigothic kingdom in Spain for a start, so they seem to have stopped being nomadic. They also saw themselves as the heirs of Rome in the sense that they were entitled to continue on formerly imperial territory as if they were the actual Romans themselves, and since they did this it might be a little clearer why we ended up calling the culture that followed the Romans “Gothic”.

The Visigothic kingdom in Iberia (Spain’s peninsula) gave its name to Catalonia, in Catalan “Catalunya”, an altered version of something like “Gothlandia”. I find it surprising that it developed in that direction. I also imagine that Catalan itself is more strongly influenced by Gothic than Castilian Spanish is. The Visigothics originally settled in an area extending along the Loire, in a southeast-northwest direction. An informative map is available (and yes, I found it on Wikipedia!):

The lighter orange area was lost in the Battle of Vouillé with the Franks, who were to occupy Gaul, in spring 507. This date indicates how early Gothic culture and power went into decline, as this was soon after the fall of Rome. However, they did later take over the area of the Suevi. The Burgundians are another East Germanic people about whom even less is known. In fact, even the Vandals, seen here as occupying the southern Mediterranean coast and hinterland in Afrika, were Germanic. It’s also notable that the Goths didn’t get anywhere with either the Celts in Brittany or the Basques. By 589, the Gothic language had become merely liturgical and because they abandoned Arianism at that point, it even lost that role. The capital was Toledo and I presume they were speaking something intermediate between Vulgar Latin and Spanish at the time. Burgos may be from the Gothic “baurgs” – “walled city”, very obviously cognate with “borough” and “burgh”. Their last king was Roderick, a name which interests me because it’s also my father’s and is distinctively Scottish to me, though apparently adapted from Ruari. In 711, he was fighting the Basques in the north when Tariq ibn Ziyad invaded the south with Berber soldiers, leading to the establishment of Al-Andaluz, but it’s notable that even now Rodrigo is a popular Spanish name. Incidentally, “Al-Andaluz” itself developed from the name of the Vandals although nobody has explained where the V went.

I’ve said that “tapas” is a Gothic word. There are other Gothic words in Castilian, including quite a few personal names such as Gomez and Alfonso. Other words include “ropa” – cognate with “robe” but meaning “clothes”; “esquina”, from “skina” – “rim”, “corner” or “plate”; “sacar” – “sack” as in “sack of Rome” but nowadays “issue” or “release”; “tacha” – “blemish”, from “taikns”, meaning “mark” and cognate with “token”; and “gafe” – “jinx”, from “gafah” – “clasp”. There doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern to these, unlike other loan words which tend to be of a particular tone or from a particular aspect of life. Portuguese also borrowed from Gothic, including “broa” – “corn and rye bread”, from “brauth”, which obviously brings “broth” to mind, and “gravura”, “engraving” in Portuguese and from “graba”, meaning “graft”. As for Catalan, there’s “brot” – “shoot” of a plant, from “brut” – “sprig”; “brossa” – “leaf litter”, “brush” (as in undergrowth) – possibly from “brukja” – “breech”, to which the Castilian “brocha”, meaning “paintbrush”, may also be connected; and remarkably “murgola” – “morel”, the fungus, from “murhwalus” – “carrot on a stick”! In this case there does seem to be a theme, specifically botany, although why is another question. These words, though often not found in the Bible, can however be traced to Gothic, so this is another source for the language.

Then there were the Ostrogoths. These settled in the former eastern Roman Empire, including Italy itself, and, like the Visigoths, founded a kingdom under Theodoric The Great, based in Ravenna. After his death, the Byzantine emperor Justinian declared war on them in 535 in an attempt to claim back formerly Roman territory. It’s also worth pointing out that Attila The Hun has a Gothic name – Attila means “daddy”, from “atta”, “father”, and the diminutive “-ila”, as found also in “Wulfila”. It seems a bit strange that an apparently non-Gothic ruler ended up being called “daddy”, but it does also show a similar tendency to use diminutives as found in some German dialects and in Dutch, though not in English. On the other hand, the way Scots uses “wee” is rather similar on occasion. I have to be honest – I don’t really understand who the Huns were except that they were an apparently Turkic nomadic tribe from central Eurasia, and given that, I don’t know why Attila’s name is Gothic, but although I’m aware of other ways in which his name has been explained, they all seem way more far-fetched than the Gothic explanation. This shows the movements of the Goths in general:

Judging by this, it is actually quite apparent that they really did replace the Romans, eventually, after spending some time in the area now called Ukraine, but they’d also had a history before that which if I remember it correctly led to them resenting the Romans and this festering grudge ended in them sacking Rome itself. It’s also evident that the former lands of the Goths have now become utterly Slavic (or Magyar) and that there is no Gothic homeland left. Nor is there any other land which can remotely be said to be Gothic.

By 476, Europe looked like this:

This was a far from stable situation, but then again Europe seems to have been basically unstable right up to the end of WWII and even beyond that when one considers the Balkan situation in the 1990s. This is all definitely worth remembering.

Everywhere the Goths lived in the former Roman Empire, even where they ruled, they were in a minority. This seems to have been a factor in their extinction. I’m guessing that many Europeans today have Gothic DNA but it’s a bit like the Neanderthals, though obviously much more recent. Many of us do have Neanderthal ancestors but there are no specific Neanderthals or even Neanderthal groups to which we can trace our ancestry even though some of us have the equivalent of having a single ancestor about six generations back. Regarding the Goths, if we regard the cutoff point of their civilisation in around 552, that’s still so long ago that nobody with Gothic ancestry can have a greater claim to a specific Gothic ancestor than anyone else. Humans have about thirty thousand genes which obviously halve on average per generation, meaning that by sixteen generations they may be completely absent in a descendant, and even a very generous estimate of forty years as a generation time gets us to six and a half centuries ago. The Goths were two and a half times as long ago and even then they were a minority.

Perhaps surprisingly though, their language did survive in some form in the Crimea right up until the late eighteenth century CE, within a lifetime of the Crimean War. It was still written into the ninth century and came to the light of the West again when a sixteenth century Flemish diplomat noticed that the language spoken there had vocabulary in common with Dutch. However, the source was not a native Gothic speaker and there are typographical errors which further distance the evidence from accuracy. There is ninth century Gothic graffiti in a church in a place called Mangup. By the sixteenth century, the Crimean Goths were using Greek and Tatar to communicate with outsiders and tended to adopt those languages themselves. Words include “ies” (“he”), “iel” (“health” (as in “hale and hearty”), “schnos” (“fiancée”), “menus” (“meat”), “ael” (“stone”, maybe cognate with “hail”?), “mycha” (“sword”) and “hrinck” (“ring”). Oddly, the word “broe” means “bread” whereas the Biblical Gothic word was “hlaifs” (as in “loaf”), and less surprisingly the numerals had been lost and “sada” from an Iranian source was used for “hundred”. Biblical Gothic had just three vowels which were however somewhat differently pronounced in different places, A, I and U, and this feature it has in common with Arabic and Quechua. This is not so for Crimean Gothic, which had a similar vowel distribution to West Germanic languages. Hence the word “schuuester” means “sister” and “goltz” is “gold”. These words, however, may be filtered through the mind of the Flemish diplomat and his assumptions. There isn’t a lot can be done about that. Nonetheless, the fact remains that a clearly Germanic language was spoken in the Crimea at the time and it had East Germanic features.

I was going to put this in just after the section on verbs but can’t find it easily, so I’ll put it here: Gothic is as far as I know the only language with just one type of demonstrative adjective and pronoun. Whereas other languages at least distinguish between “this” and “that”, as English does, and often go further to express differences between “this by me”, “that by you” and “that over there”, Gothic doesn’t do this at all. It has one demonstrative adjective and pronoun, “thata” in the nominative singular neuter (not written that way in Gothic – 𐌸𐌰𐍄𐌰 is the word in Gothic script), meaning both “that” and “this”. On the whole, one might think a language can’t get away with just one word here, but somehow it does. It seems to reflect this by using certain verbs differently. English and many other languages have pairs of verbs with inward and outward connotations, such as “come” and “go”, and “get” and “put”. Gothic does have “qiman”, cognate with “come”, and it has “gaggan”, or rather 𐌲𐌰𐌲𐌲𐌰𐌽, meaning “go”, but it more often uses the verb “atgaggan” or 𐌰𐍄𐌲𐌰𐌲𐌲𐌰𐌽 to mean “come”, apparently emphasising the similarity between coming and going but needing to make a distinction between them. “Qiman” also means “arrive”, whose sense is more often expressed by a more complex verb with, for example, a prefix in many other languages. I think this is linked to the dearth of demonstrative pronouns, as this then means “move to this place”.

Another peculiar feature of Gothic vocabulary is that the word cognate with “child”, “kilthei”, actually means “womb”. The usual word for child is “barn”, obviously cognate with the Scots “bairn”. You can vaguely see how this happened but it’s hard to work the process out exactly. Other words are easier, such as “handus”, meaning “hand”, and “land”. Sometimes an ancient link with Italic languages can be discerned, as with “ahwa” for “river”. This is clearly the same word as “aqua” and also existed in Old English as “æ”, which later became “a”, then /ə/, after which it needed replacing with words such as “bourne”, “stream”, “beck” and of course “river”. I once made a list of words in Gothic, Latin, Sanskrit, Greek and probably some other early examples of particular branches of our language family and it was generally closest to Latin, although had I done that with Celtic, that would’ve been closer.

It isn’t really possible to think of Gothic as more like any particular surviving Germanic language, but to me it does kind of feel like it has closer affinities to Old English than other relatives. This may simply be my familiarity. However, German itself has been through the mill due to the High German consonant shift and the Nordic languages may be tonal and append the definite article to the end of the word. Gothic doesn’t use definite articles as such, but its demonstrative adjectives, often the same in form as definite articles in the Western Germanic languages including Old English, precede the noun and, like English, it also lacks an indefinite article. One thing Gothic did which no other recorded Germanic language has is change “fl-” to “thl-“.

I probably should say something about the semantic drift of the word “Gothic” and the script. This is the Gothic alphabet:

𐌰𐌱𐌲𐌳𐌴𐌵𐌶𐌷𐌸𐌹𐌺𐌻𐌼𐌽𐌾𐌿𐍀𐍁𐍂𐍃𐍄𐍅𐍆𐍇𐍉𐍊

This is clearly adapted mainly from Greek and I don’t know because I’m very familiar with it but to me it almost feels like it’s only technically different from Latin. However, it does have a few different features. It’s unicameral – no upper or lower case – and like some other languages it uses letters as numbers, beginning with 1 and working up to 900. In the case of Gothic, there are two characters with no phonetic value at all, namely 𐍁 for 90 and 𐍊 for 900. I’m not aware of any other language that does this although Greek used obsolete letters as well as its usual alphabet. Some of the letters are adapted runes, and Gothic did used to be written in runes, but unusually rather than using “þ” or rather its runic equivalent, Gothic borrows the Greek “ψ” for the “th” sound. It does have the voiced equivalent but only as an allophone of /d/ between vowels rather than a phoneme in its own right. Uniquely, there’s a single letter for the voiceless labialised velar fricative, which marginally still exists in English and Scots and used to be present in other Germanic languages but never had a letter or even a rune of its own. It also has 𐌵 for “kw”, which in many Indo-European languages is a simultaneous sound. This still occasionally occurs in English, as with the words “quick” and “queen”, but mostly only in loan words from Romance languages such as “question”. Because Gothic was written in an adapted Greek alphabet, it uses the repeated “GG” to represent the “NG” sound, although it did use Ing when written in runes.

Gothic did use runes, the common Elder Futhark rather than its own version, but because they converted to Christianity early, they didn’t use them for very long and there are few surviving artifacts with them inscribed.

That, then, is the Gothic script. However, the term is most often used to mean this kind of thing:

This is not Gothic. It’s more accurately called Blackletter and there are subcategories of it such as Fraktur. Fraktur in particular was used for German and various other languages up to the middle of the last century, when surprisingly it was discontinued by Hitler in 1941. I think he said it looked too much like Hebrew. This “Gothic” is an attempt to speed up the production of manuscripts due to Carolingian minuscule, its predecessor, being too labour-intensive. It has an association with various central European languages in a very similar way to Gaelic script being associated with Q-Celtic and formerly English as insular half-uncial. It was also the basis of a style of cursive handwriting still used today by some people. There’s also a completely different-looking set of typefaces called Gothic, which are apparently simply sans serif fonts.

Gothic architecture in its first wave was of course what we see in mediaeval churches and lasted from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. There are rib vaults, tracery, pointed arches, flying buttresses and a growing emphasis on verticality, which actually reflects the Blackletter calligraphic style. The Gothic revival occurred shortly after but peaked in Georgian and early Victorian times, and was also found in the design of smaller objects such as clocks, vases and furniture. If one were to use Gothic elements in design or architecture in the original sense of the word, things would look very different, being more like the grave goods of Sutton Hoo.

The next step away from the original meaning occurs in Gothic literature. This involves gloom, horror, mystery, fear and haunting. It’s part of the Gothic revival. Gothic architecture was sometimes applied to castles and the presence of flying buttresses leads to dark shadows and gloom. Novels are often set in castles. Storms, torrential rain and ice are also part of it, such as on the moors of ‘Wuthering Heights’. The supernatural tends to be involved too, for example vampires. It’s also a subgenre of Romanticism, involving a rebellion against rationalism and the idea that everything worthwhile can be quantified. Dark moods are reflected by the weather, such as fog or rain at a funeral. I came very close to reading ‘Wuthering Heights’ as a child because Emily Brontë shares my birthday, as does Kate Bush, but it didn’t happen. It would probably have taken me in quite a different direction as an angst-ridden teenager. It’s quite intense and histrionic, which describes me then quite well. It’s an attempt to explore the darker side of human experience. The past hangs heavily upon the story, and there’s a claustrophobic feel to things.

We tend to associate linguistic features of certain languages with where they’re spoken. For instance, Romance languages, particularly Castilian, Italian and Portuguese, are infused with a Mediterranean air, whereas Norwegian, Swedish and Danish call a dingier and grimmer atmosphere to mind. In this respect, Gothic would work well due to its closeness to Old Norse, but the Goths actually lived in much warmer and sunnier climes, meaning that Gothic literature doesn’t really fit well with it. If the Goths had survived, we’d now associate their languages with the Med, and perhaps make a subtler distinction between that and the likes of Icelandic, despite the stubborn insistence of the mind that Icelandic is spoken in cold, dingy and maybe snowy places. Therefore these two Gothic images are very disparate.

This general tone was most recently transferred into Gothic “youth” culture, which attempts to capture some of the vibe associated with Gothic literature. It’s yet another branch, whose development I actually witnessed. If I’d been anything as a teen and young adult, I probably would’ve been a Goth myself, but I never was. This probably surprises people because they think of me as a hippie. I feel particularly attached to Goth subculture today because of the death of Sophie Lancaster, who was murdered for being a Goth on 11th August 2007. Her boyfriend Robert Maltby was also seriously injured. She was murdered more generally for being different and the Sophie Lancaster Foundation was set up in response to oppose hate crime, bullying and victimisation.

On a lighter note, during the peak of Gothic music and fashion in the late 1980s I attempted to translate the lyrics of some well-known Goth records into Gothic. They tend to lend themselves quite easily to this because of their content being quite similar in some ways to Biblical language. This may in fact have been what provoked me to look at the Gothic Bible in the first place, so my route back into Christianity is via a group which turned out to be seriously marginalised, and since Christ came substantially for such people there’s a whole other way in which it can be understood as speaking to Goths in the modern sense of the word. Another possible approach to Gothic lyrics today would be to seek out those songs strongly based on Biblical passages such as Christopher Tin’s ‘Baba Yetu’, potential adaptations of the Magnificat and possibly the likes of Boney M’s ‘By The Rivers Of Babylon’, although much of the Gothic Bible has not survived.

So to finish then, one of my favourite lines in George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is O’Brien’s “we shall meet again in the place where there is no darkness”, because it sounds hopeful but in fact it refers to a torture cell where continuous blazing light prevents sleep. This is of course a typical inversion for the novel, and the darkness of Gothic literature, Blackletter and the ultimate death of the whole Gothic people combined with the focus on darkness among today’s Gothic subculture is perhaps healthier and more positive than keeping the sunny side up, and the idea of the evil of the bright side, and of course whiteness, is inadequately explored and thought about. Perhaps the Gothic language would even be a good medium for doing this.