Crimean Gothic language
| Crimean Gothic | |
|---|---|
| Native to | formerly Crimea |
| Extinct | by the 18th century(?) |
|
Indo-European
|
|
| Gothic alphabet | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | crim1255 |
Crimean Gothic was a Gothic dialect spoken by the Crimean Goths in some isolated locations in Crimea until the late 18th century.
The existence of a Germanic dialect in the Crimea is attested in a number of sources from the 9th century to the 18th century. However, only a single source provides any details of the language itself: a letter by the Flemish ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, dated 1562 and first published in 1589, gives a list of some eighty words and a song supposedly in the language.
Busbecq's information is problematic in a number of ways: his informants were not unimpeachable (one was a Greek speaker who knew Crimean Gothic as a second language, the other a Goth who had abandoned his native language in favour of Greek); there is the possibility that Busbecq's transcription was influenced by his own language (a Flemish dialect of Dutch); there are undoubted misprints in the printed text, which is the only source.
Nonetheless, much of the vocabulary cited by Busbecq is unmistakably Germanic and was recognised by him as such:
(Note: In the (Biblical) Gothic examples, medial -gg- represents the sound /ŋg/, a feature of Classical Greek orthography adopted by Ulfilas)
Busbecq also cites a number of words which he did not recognise but which are now known to have Germanic cognates:
Busbecq mentions a definite article, which he records as either tho or the (which may be either a gender difference, or an allophonic pronunciation much as with English "the", which is pronounced either /ðə/ or /ðiː/), and possibly attesting to Crimean Gothic's having retained /θ/ or /ð/ like English, at least in some positions.
A possible Gothic speaker was freed by Mondorf, a Jesuit in 1750.
While the initial identification of this language as "Gothic" probably rests on ethnological rather than linguistic grounds — that is, the speakers were identified as Goths therefore the language must be Gothic — it shares a number of distinctive phonological developments with the Gothic of Ulfilas's Bible. For example, the word ada "egg" shows the typical Gothic "sharpening" of Proto-Germanic *-jj- into -ddj- (as in Ulfilian Gothic iddja "went" from PGmc. *ijjē), being from Proto-Germanic *ajja-.
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