Wiktionary:About Gothic

This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. Specifically it is a policy think tank, working to develop a formal policy. Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language, and the oldest Germanic language for which significant texts are known. It is a descendant of Proto-Germanic. The aim of this page is to standardize the layout of Gothic entries and explain the rationale behind that standardization.

Script

See also: Gothic transliteration

Gothic was written in its own alphabet, which resembled the Greek and Latin alphabets. By Wiktionary policy, Gothic entries are entered in Gothic script, not in Latin script.

However, since most students of Gothic learn it in transliterated form, and most dictionaries and grammars similarly consider only transliterations, this vote was passed. As a consequence, romanization entries (soft redirects) may be created for Gothic words in their Latin script versions. The purpose of such entries is to make it easier to find the right Gothic-script entry for users who are not familiar with the Gothic script or are unable to enter it on their computers. As such, they must not contain grammatical information of any kind, and should simply link to the equivalent Gothic script entry, using the special ===Romanization=== part-of-speech header, along with the templates {{got-rom}} and {{romanization of|got}}. For example, for qino:

==Gothic==

===Romanization===
{{got-rom|head=qinō}}

# {{romanization of|got|𐌵𐌹𐌽𐍉}}

The names of the transliterated entries are in 'raw' transliterated form, which uses a one-to-one mapping of the Gothic alphabet to the standard Latin alphabet letters, along with þ and ƕ. As in other old languages, macrons are not used in these entry names, although the {{got-rom}} template allows a head= parameter to display them if necessary. No consensus has been reached yet on whether to allow the combinations ⟨th⟩ and ⟨hw⟩ alongside the de facto standard of ⟨þ⟩ and ⟨ƕ⟩. If allowed, these combinations may create ambiguities with the Gothic combinations ⟨𐍄𐌷⟩ and ⟨𐌷𐍅⟩. Please note that Wiktionary does not indicate the different etymological origins of the digraphs ⟨𐌰𐌹⟩ (ai) and ⟨𐌰𐌿⟩ (au), so we transliterate them simply as e.g. augō, not áugō, and dauhtar, not daúhtar.

Vowel length

Even though distinctions in vowel length between ū and u (as in 𐌲𐌿𐌳𐌷𐌿𐍃 (gudhūs)) and ā and a (as in 𐍅𐌰𐌲𐌲𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹𐍃 (waggāreis)) are not indicated in Gothic orthography, we do show them in our transliterations as much as possible. There is no internal evidence from Gothic clearly indicating vowel length in these cases, so the only way to tell where one of these vowels is long is based on etymology. Only these two letters require manual addition of transliterations with macron, as the transliteration module used on Wiktionary cannot predict when to insert them.

The rest of the vowels is automatically transliterated correctly with macrons added where appropriate. The letter ⟨𐍉⟩ is always transliterated as a long ō, ⟨𐌹⟩ is always a short ĭ when not part of a digraph, but may also be found in digraphs which represent long vowel sounds. For example: ⟨𐌴𐌹⟩ (ei) indicates a long ī sound. ⟨𐌴⟩, which is not marked with a macron when found in the aforementioned digraph, is always long and thus marked with a macron as ē when found by itself.

Diaeresis

The diaeresis found on word-initial i (as well as rarely to disambiguate syllable borders which could be misinterpreted as diphthongs, e.g. in gaïus) in most known manuscripts should not be included in inflection tables, page names or similar. Arguably, one might add it to direct quotes added as citations to be truer to the manuscripts from which the words are taken. However, following that same logic, one might as well exclude spaces between words as Gothic texts use scriptio continua. When one does decide not to use scriptio continua but instead inserts spaces, the need for diaeresis is also removed. It is thus better not to include diaeretic punctuation, following Streitberg's standard edition which also inserts spaces and avoids diaeresis (except in cases such as the aforementioned gaïus, where we still want to avoid it in entry titles at the very least).

Imported romanizations

Some time ago, all words occurring in the Gothic Bible of Ulfila were imported in the form of romanizations. This means that in essence, nearly all attested Gothic words/forms are present on Wiktionary. A small minority of words was not imported, mainly those that are first attested in some minor fragments amounting to less than a percent of the corpus but also a lot of proper nouns seem to have been skipped (e.g. abraham was not initially imported). Generally if a romanization entry exists, it is safe to say that the word is attested (although it doesn't hurt to check: something may have gone wrong in the importing of romanizations, or people may have erroneously created a romanization for an unattested form). However, a significant amount of the actual Gothic script entries has not been created yet. The ones that are missing are listed in Category:Gothic romanizations without a main entry, which still contains hundreds of words.

Words that were not imported

Besides the proper nouns mentioned above, words that were not imported in romanized form include any form unique to one of the texts below; they must be added manually. Note, however, that many of the readings in the minor fragments are uncertain and disputed due to the fragmentary nature and near-illegibility of the surviving words. Uncertain readings may be added if they have scholarly support, but note their uncertainty on the entry.

• Fragmenta Pannonica (a.k.a. Hacs-Bendekpuszta tablet, Tabella Hungarica)
• Gothic Calendar
• Gotica Bononiensia (a.k.a. Codex Bononiensis, Sermo Bononiensis, Gothica Bononiensia)
• Gotica Parisina
• Gotica Veronensia (and glosses to other manuscripts were not imported either!)
• Gotica Vindobonensia
• Mangup-Kale inscriptions
• Naples and Arezzo Deeds
• Runic inscriptions

Unattested forms

Unattested lemma forms

The normal practice on Wiktionary is to include the main definition, along with inflection tables and etymology, on the lemma form of a word (infinitive for verbs, nominative singular for nouns, and so forth). However, as the lemma form is not always attested for every Gothic word, this means that the lemma is not always present among the imported romanizations. This means that some romanizations that should exist currently do not, because they are lemmas which are not attested in the lemma form but only in inflected forms. One should create the lemma entry, however, as long as at least one of its inflected forms is attested; it does not need to be marked as reconstructed.

If there is ambiguity about the lemma form because the attested forms allow for more than one possibility, this should be indicated in the entry; presumably entries for each possible reconstruction should be created and linked to one another through {{alternative form of}}. An alternative method of dealing with such cases is not to create a lemma entry and provide all relevant information on the attested non-lemma page, as at 𐌰𐌿𐍂𐌰𐌷𐌾𐍉𐌼 (aurahjōm).

Unattested non-lemma forms

As with the lemma forms, many seemingly predictable inflected forms remain unattested in the corpus. Unattested non-lemma forms do not merit an entry, and please note that Gothic is unlike Latin in its treatment on Wiktionary in that all predicted non-lemma forms are not just assumed to exist, whereas Latin non-lemma entries are typically created indiscriminately until challenged at WT:RFVN and proven unattested. Thus, only those Gothic non-lemma forms which are known to be attested should have a form-of entry created.

Unattested participles

An exception to the above guideline is made under specific circumstances for participle entries, which are categorized as non-lemma forms as well but treated slightly differently. Its uninflected (base) form gets an entry if (and only if) there is an attested inflected form of that participle, even when the uninflected form itself is not attested. An example of this is found at 𐌲𐌰𐍅𐌰𐌿𐍂𐌺𐌾𐌰𐌽𐌳𐍃 (gawaurkjands), which is unattested in the corpus but which has an attested inflected form 𐌲𐌰𐍅𐌰𐌿𐍂𐌺𐌾𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌴𐌹 (gawaurkjandei). This is mainly for ease of navigation: inflected forms of participles are not found on the main entry for a verb, but only in the inflection table on the participle entry. (Participles are thus treated as sublemmas.)

Crimean Gothic

The Crimean Gothic language is not considered a direct descendant of regular (Wulfilan) Gothic and is not treated as such on Wiktionary, although of course cognacy can be noted in etymology sectons. It has a separate language code, gme-cgo, and the words are added in Latin script (example).

Wulfilan Gothic words attested in Crimea, such as the ones attested in the early medieval Mangup-Kale inscriptions (example), are included as Gothic and not Crimean Gothic, as the latter is taken to refer specifically to the demotic vernacular recorded by De Busbecq in the the 16th century.

Further reading

Books

• [Codicological reference] Falluomini, Carla, The Gothic version of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles (Berlin/Boston 2015)
• [Etymological reference] Lehmann, Winfred, A Gothic Etymological Dictionary (Leiden 1986)
• [Grammatical reference] Wright, Joseph, Grammar of the Gothic Language, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1966)
• [Grammatical reference] Miller, Gary, The Oxford Gothic Grammar (Oxford 2019)

Wikipedia

• Gothic language
• Gothic alphabet

Web

• Gotica.de: a lot of relevant bibliography per fragment/codex & more
• Gotisches Wörterbuch: Köbler's comprehensive dictionary in digital form, does not include words from the Gotica Bononiensia or Mangup graffiti
• Introduction to Gothic: basic course at the UT Austin website
• Silver Bible online: high-res images of the Codex Argenteus
• Wulfila.be: online searchable corpus, lacking only some minor fragments, with clickable words & more