The Obituary
Gothic was spoken by the Goths, the Germanic people who pressed into the Roman Empire and founded kingdoms in Italy, Gaul, and Spain. It is the only East Germanic language preserved in a substantial body of text, almost all of it from Bishop Wulfila’s fourth-century translation of the Bible, written in an alphabet he devised himself. As the Goths settled among Romance- and other Germanic-speaking populations, their language was absorbed, fading from use by roughly the 8th or 9th century CE.
Worth remembering
- Almost all surviving Gothic comes from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century Bible written in silver and gold ink on purple parchment.
- Bishop Wulfila invented an alphabet specifically to write Gothic and translate scripture in the 4th century.
Sources
- Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language known mainly from Wulfila's 4th-century Bible translation. Wikipedia
- Gothic is the earliest substantially documented Germanic language and the only East Germanic language with a sizeable corpus. Encyclopaedia Britannica
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.