Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Sep 10, 2021 6:40 pm

Today I have visited two museums and continued to add new gory details to my latest painting, so I haven't had time to study languages yet - but yesterday I did do a few relevant things - like studying on section more in the Irish tale about Cu Chulainn, who apparently killed everyone around him and never was defeated until ... well, until he was defeated and killed. I didn't read more in the Gramadach - maybe this evening. And after that I rebrushed another neglected language, namely Albanian. I studied the Albanian Wikipedia article about Indonesia (using a bilingual printout with the translation part in French), and right in this moment I am thinking about finding an Indonesian Wikipedia article about Albania - if there is one. By the way, I have been to Albania twice and I can recommend it as a travel destination. You wouldn't have expected that during the long and sinister reign of Enver Hoxha! And apart from that I still have the Russian guide to Дельфы on the chair that makes it out for a night table, and yes, I do read some each evening, but it's slow going because I tend to fall asleep. By the way, I also have got the Italian version (to Delfi) and the Greek version (to Δελφοί) on that same chair, but I am too lazy to stretch out my arm to fetch them.

Apart from that, yesterday I also watched a TV program about the mighty Akkadian empire (founded by mighty Sargon I the Great). It didn't tell me much new, except maybe that it now apparently has been proved that it crumbled as the result of an more mighty drought. I did however get interested in reading more about the British genius Rawlinson, who cracked the cuneiform writing system using a trilingual inscription, where he recognized - and was able read - the version in Ancient Iranian. I wonder how many people on the planet today could read an inscription in Ancient Iranian!

IT: E poi ho iniziato a leggere "Lingua e storia dei Goti" di P.Scardigli, che mi è capitato di trovare sul retro delle mie scaffali. Il libro è così vecchio (1969) che ho dovuto sbudellarlo prima che si potesse leggerlo. Magari i lettori più giovani qui non hanno mai visto un libro del genere, ma erano stati stampati su fogli di grandi dimensioni, che sono stati poi piegati così com'erano - e quindi gli acquirenti dei libri dovevano aprirli con un tagliacarte. Tagliacarte?? Sì, coltelli speciali sono stati venduti appositamente per questo scopo. Fortunatamente, tutte queste sciocchezze appartengono al passato - infatti, alcune persone non leggono più libri, ma solo brevi messaggi sui social media. Ed io non leggo social media a meno che questo forum sia percepito tal quale.

Per inciso, il libro è lento da leggere perché cita molte parole gotiche con le loro presunte etimologie (e le citazioni latine non sono tradotte). Ci sono capitoli per le relazioni dei Goti con altri Germanici, Celti, Slavi, Romani e Unni - sembra che i Goti chi erano pagani convinti si siano uniti agli Unni (dove furono gentilmente ricevuti dal terrificante Attila), mentre gli altri si siano diretti ad ovest e vi abbiano formato dei regni entro i confini romani. Questi ultimi (Visigoti, Ostrogoti) hanno lasciato soltanto testi in latino, perciò oggi non abbiamo idea se la loro lingua differisse da quella di Ermanrico.

Tuttavia, è sorprendente quanto poco si impara effettivamente sulla storia politica. La realtà era che i Goti (sotto Ermanrico) riuscirono a formare un impero dal Baltico al Mar Nero - ma poi arrivarono gli Unni e rovinarono la festa. Un'enclave sopravvisse in Crimea così a lungo che un inviato straniero (il signor de Busbecq) riuscì a visitarli. Ha notato qualche parole, ma non tante da poter illustrare lo sviluppo dei mille anni passati in dettaglio. E oltre a queste poche parole (e frammenti simili provenienti da altre aree, ma molto più anziani), sono sopravvissuti solo un solo poema (Skeirins) e parte di una traduzione della Bibbia. E nel prossimo capitolo si parla di questa traduzione, fatta da un certo Ulfila (o Wulfila).

Behistun inscription (Wikipedia).jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Sep 10, 2021 10:19 pm

It is Saturday now.

Yesterday evening I spent most of my time on Albanian. I had started reading the second article in a three-page printout from Wikipedia, and that was actually the page that describes how to use Wikipedia. The first part of the first sentence is very simple: "Wikipedia Shqiptare nuk ka shumë artikuj," ('Wikipedia Albanian not has many articles' (my translation) - and I'm not going to contradict that).

The second is not simple at all: "pranaj nima juej për t'shtuër artikuj a shum e nevojshme." - actually I couldn't find the first three words in any of my two dictionaries, only something that might be related. At print-out time Goggle translate gave this translation into English: 'so you need to add articles or much needed'. Well, "pranë" is a preposition that means 'nearby', but the -a looks like a definite article, so... "Nima" is funny because GT today refused to translate it. The old translation sounded convincing, but I can't see how something that means "nearby" fits into the pattern. At least "juej" is guessable - on my old green sheets I have "juaj" for 'yours' (2p plural), so the only thing that bothers me is why the text has another vowel. The word "artikuj" is deceptively comprehensible, but actually the dictionary form is "artikull" - so "the -ll" has been dropped in favor of the masculine plural ending "-j". Where could I have been warned about that? If I had written something in Albanian I would probably have made a blunder here!

Luckily the preposition "për" isn't a problem - it roughly means 'for'. But I had forgotten about the "t'" with infinitives.. Did I write infinitives? Wasn't Albanian one of the languages that had dropped them, like Greek and Bulgarian (and to a large extent Romanian)? So I looked "Infinitive Albanian" up on the internet and found a page that infomed me that "Gheg and Tosk have important phonological differences, while morphologically the only important one is the loss of the infinitive in Tosk which uses constructions with the subjunctive, instead.(...) The standard language was based on Gheg from the beginning of the Albanian state until World War II and since then it has been modeled on Tosk constituting the Modern standard." So the article in Wikipedia is just a bit 'altmodisch' (or influenced by Gheg). Consequently "për t'shtuer" simply means 'for to add' , and sure enough: even my smallest dictionary quotes "shtoj" (really 1.p sing. 'I add', but translated into German as an infinitive "hinzufügen"). Mystery solved... or? Where could I have been warned about the wowel change?

The "e" before "nevojshme" ('necessary') is a 'linking clitic'. In my head I translate them all into Indonesian "yang", but haha, in Albanian they are inflected - mostly as nought, "a" or "ë". The big problem is however that there are cases where they are used and others where they aren't, and the rules are complicated. I have something about the subject in a book named "Albanisch als Fremdsprache", which unfortunately is an unholy mixture of grammar and exercise collection, but I may have to use it to learn more about these 'yangs'.

I'm not going to drag the honored reader of these lines through a complete analysis of the text in question, but I think it is clear why it takes time to study Albanian when you don't know the language better than I do. I need to do these word-for-word studies of texts to understand the mechanisms in Albanian, but I also have to do wordlists to learn lot of words fast without being caught up in a quagmire of problems like the ones I have described above.

By the way, when I wanted to link to the article it had disappeared (or been changed). I did find a link in Google to a similar text which contains the sentence in this form "Wikipedia Shqiptare nuk ka shumë artikuj, prandaj ndihma juaj për të shtuar artikuj është shumë e nevojshme", which has solved most of my problems - for instance "prandaj" means 'therefore' and "ndihmoj" means 'I help', and the infinitive has been replaced by a subjunctive - that's how I remember my Albanian ! Even GT is happy: 'Albanian Wikipedia does not have many articles, so your help in adding articles is much needed'. But when I tried to access this new page I was rocketed to another page without that sentence, apparently because the link "https://sq.wiki.hereiszyn.com/wiki/Wikipedia:mirësevini" refers to a random page. And the original article has apparently been tosk'ed.

'Nuff about Albanian.

Albanian Nouns, yangs and adjectives.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Sep 12, 2021 12:37 am

Let me first mention that I finished my Russian guide to Delphi last night - but that sounds a bit more impressive than it is: just 37 pages net, the rest was pictures. The guide (in Greek) to Rhodes had much more text. But now I have to find something else to read. I started reading the Greek version of the Delphi-guide, but that was too easy and boring now that I know the content, and the version in Italian would have been even easier and even more boring - so, nooo ..

So to find something different I have rummaged through my travel souvenirs. I am fairly sure that I have a guide to the Vatican museums in Dutch hidden somewhere, but I couldn't find it right away - maybe it has ended up at the backside of my bookshelves among the literature or in some other irrelevant location. I did however find several other relevant items, like a guide to Dougga (in Tunisia) in French, a guide to Thessaloniki in Greek and the one I'm going to use tonight: a guide to the French town Carcassonne in Catalan - I haven't read anything sizeable in Catalan for some time, and I wouldn't mind being reminded of that medieval gem in any language (actually I have also got it in Russian, but I would like some variation now).

Apart from that I have spent time visiting museums and greenhouses in my town and adding a grilled turkey and some startled poultry and a Tyrannosaurus rex to my latest painting, so my limited study time has been reserved for one language: Irish.

I mentioned recently that I had made some printouts from the Nualeargais, men today I discovered that I have edited the excerpts and added some summaries in preparation for the green sheets I never got around to write - and now I hope to make amends for that. But Irish is an intractrable beast. The articles influence the beginning of the following substantives, and there are five declinations (plus a slew of irregular nouns) and at least three four cases, including a vocative which seems marginal for the moment and a socalled 'dative' which ought to have been named prepositionalis because that's what it is - but the prepositions exert an X-ray effect throught the article (if there is one) on the substantive beginnings.

As a preparation for making the final green sheets I have made some sketches to find a simple way to show these things as simply as possible, and now I think I have found a way to do it - but I still have to check the content with my other grammars, and there are also some holes which I have to find out about. Like for instance: do the prepositions impose the same mutations on the substantives if there isn't an article. And I have to check that there really aren't mutations in the dative in the plural - that sounds too good to be true! And I have to add something about the adjectives, preferably in a way that shows articles in a table like the one on the sketch below and another that combines substantives and adjectives, if pssible. And then there is a lot of work to be done on the inflected prepositions, the verbs (ouch!) and other topics later on. However to good thing is that I can feel that I'm returning to the level I had during my last active period with this language - nothing to write home about, but above zero.

And by the way: I'm also listening through the symphonies of Anton Bruckner right now. So I'm slightly busy..

Irish_steps-towards-formulating-a-nominal-green-sheet.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:17 pm

EN: As mentioned I have used a Catalan guide to Carcassonne in France as my goodnight reading - but it was just 48 pages and many pictures, so I read it in one go in less than one hour. Most of it was plain sailing, but ...

CAT: ... hi havia força paraules del glossari arquitectural dels fortaleses que no coneixia, i tot i que jo havia portat el meu Larousse amb més de vint mil paraules, tampoc el no les coneixia totes. Per exemple, es pot caminar per 'cortines' entre les trenta torres, però es diu que l'alçada és de fins a 8 metres "sense encloure els merló" - ahem, "merló"?. Es podria endevinar que té alguna cosa a veure amb les parets exteriors, però vaig haver de fer una recerca a Internet per determinar com. Ni tan sols la viquipèdia catalana coneixia la paraula, però en la versió anglesa vaig trobar aquesta explicació: "A merlon is the solid upright section of a battlement (a crenellated parapet) in medieval architecture or fortifications." La versió catalana, al seu torn, coneixia una altra paraula del text, "merlet": "Un merlet o rastell i muró (i ant. dentell) és cadascun dels espais massissos que alternen amb altres de buits damunt un parapet, formant part d'un acabament fortificat d'un mur o d'una torre.". La majoria del llibre, però, no em va posar problemes similars.

EN: So a "merlet" (or "merlo") is the high part of a crenelated defensive wall between the lower sections (or holes) used by the defenders.

CAT: Tan fàcil no estaré segur llegir el meu pròxim pastilla per dormir, un llibre petit libre sobre Tessalònica en grec - però ric en text.

F4444a01_Carcassonne.jpg

EN: I have also mentioned that my Dutch guide to the Vatican museums has mysteriously disappared, but I did something else to refresh my Dutch. I have listened through the symphonies of Bruckner, and I have some of them in recordings by the Concertgebouw orchestra under Haitink (nobody has ever come even close to his version of the 4. movement of no. 8 !).

DU: Dus het was natuurlijk een voor de hand liggende gelegenheid om te lezen over Nederlandse dirigenten in de Nederlandse Wikipedia - eerst Haitink, dan van Beinum, dan Mengelberg (van wie na de Tweede Wereldoorlog zijn paspoort werd ingetrokken en hij kreeg een ban een totaal verbod om NOOIT meer in Nederland te dirigeren). Van daaruit naar enkele Duitse dirigenten, maar steeds op het Nederlands. En hoewel ik deze taal de laatste tijd niet veel heb gecultiveerd, was het eenvoudig om deze teksten te lezen.

GER: Übrigens finde ich, daß Bruckners 9. Symphonie immer mit dem 4. Satz aufgeführt werden sollte, auch wenn es dem Komponisten nicht gelungen sei, ihn zu vollenden. Ich glaube nicht, daß Haitink diesen Satz jemals gespielt hat, aber es gibt einige sehr plausible Ausgaben mit z.B. Rattle von der vermutlich endgültige Version (Samale/Phillips/Cohrs/Mazzuca).
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Tue Sep 14, 2021 9:30 pm

Today I had hired a car and visited one aquarium and three zoos, so there hasn't been time for much studying - especially because I also chose to organize my photos from the trip immediately after my return home. I have nevertheless read some messages in this forum, and one of them reminded me of a series of videos published by Ecolinguist, in which someone poses questions about the meaning of words to some other savvy persons. The twist in this is that every person speaks his/her own language, including the person with the riddles, and then they just have to adjust their ears to the foreign languages. Two of these videos feature ScorpioMartianus, who speaks and poses riddles in Latin to a Brazilian, an Italian and a Mexican speaker - so you can actually train your listening abilites in three Romance languages plus Latin in one go.

F6202a04 _ hippie-elk (Scandinavian Animal Park).jpg

If I had been a total language freak I would have listened to the wholes series once again and continued till dawn, but no, I must admit ( :oops: :? ) that I have listened to piano music by Busoni and keyboard works of John Bull instead - that's the problem with people who have too many hobbies! However when Busoni finally runs out of steam around midnight I intend to listen to a video where three latinists try to understand one native Romanian speaker ('Gia') - that will just be two languages in one video, but I don't hear any of them on a daily basis so it'll be a useful exercise. And after that it is a bit of Greek and goodbye.

I still have the car tomorrow, but the weather oracles predict rain so I may return home earlier than expected (and with fewer photos), and then I have time to study of couple of languages.

And yesterday I started reading the Greek guide to Thessaloniki - but I fell asleep after a few pages. "Ånden er redebon, men kødet er skrøbeligt" as we say in Danish..." - at least those who are old enough to have lived before the latest Bible revision, which changed "redebon" to the banal "rede" (=ready) (English version: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak", Matthew something)

EcoLinguist - Romaneste si 3 x limba latina.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Sep 17, 2021 3:31 pm

The weather Wednesday started out greyish and wet, but I managed to visited three museums before the rain really started in earnest (36 mm in 6 hours) - so when that mayhem started I returned the hired car and went home by bus. No more tourism. That meant that I had time not only to organize the harvest of photos and to add some details to my current painting, but also to study a Wikipedia text about the Silurian period in Bahasa Indonesia and to some more pages in "Lingua e Storia dei Goti", and I added some more this morning so that I now have reached page 202. The author is (or rather was) an oldfashioned philologist who sees the whole world as a question of word etymologies, which makes the book quite boring - but it's in Italian, and I haven't read so many pages in Italian in recent times (and I am only halfway through it).

There are very few bright sides, but one is at page 114, where the Goths discuss what to do about the books they have stolen from Athens. Some think they are magical evil things that ought to be burned, but ]"uno dei loro capi, persona anziana e famosa per la sua saggezza, li persuase di mutare avviso: 'Lasciate ai Greci i loro libri' disse' 'fin tanto che passeranno il tempo con simili inutili giocattoli non ci sarà da temere che ci diano fastidio in guerra' " (i.e. "Let the Grecs keep their books. As long as they spend their time on such useless playthings there is no risk that they'll bother us in war"). One of the last things I read yesterday was an evaluation of the Skeirins, which is the only other sizeable Gothic text that has been saved (apart from a few commercial letters and parts of a calendar). It is later than Ulfila's bible and has had the reputation of being boring and full of linguistic errors, but the author of my book doesn't think that it is full of errors - it is just overtly complicated and .. well, boring.

For a short period after the fall of the Westroman empire the Ostrogoths under Theodoric ruled Italy and the Westgoths ruled Spain (after they had been ejected from present day France by the Franks), but then the Byzantine emperor Justinian sent an army to Italy and the Moslems from Marocco conquered Spain, and then suddenly the Goths had become almost invisible - how come? One reason is that they saw themselves as a ruling class and didn't try to convert the populations they ruled to Gothicism or even to teach them their language. And then there is another reason, namely that the Goths mostly were Arians, and therefore both the Roman-Catholic and the Greek-Orthodox church saw little reason to conserve the writings of the Goths.

By the way, I had a medical check-up today - nothing much to worry about, but while I waited I read some of the Assimil Indonesian mini-language guide, and it struck me that I have a weakness in the vocabulary of daily life - for some reason I have mostly read about paleontology and geology and other lofty topics in Indonesian, so now I have planned to use the practical example words of the Assimil thing for an Indonesian wordlist.

I have also added some information about Irish adjectives to my pre-green sheets. It seems that the smartest way to present that stuff is to say that there is lenition in the singular on an adjective after a substantive that itself is lenited - or could have been so if it hadn't started in d or t (what about wowels??) and after substantives ending in slender sounds in the plural - and not if the adjective is used as a predicative. And the endings of attributive adjectives ending in consonants are roughly the same as the substantives after 1. strong declension if they are masculine, 2. strong declension if they are feminine, 3. strong declension if they end in -íl or -ir and a blessed no change at all if they end in a vowel. And that's all I want to know right now.

P6112b02_Mosaici-del-battistero-degli-Ariani-in-Ravenna.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby luke » Fri Sep 17, 2021 5:03 pm

Iversen wrote:I have also added some information about Irish adjectives to my pre-green sheets.

I thought about your green sheets yesterday when I was talking to a peer about firewalls and saying a concentric circle diagram with meaningful labels is indeed the logical configuration and such a clearer way to present the most salient information. Technical folks often do more of a outside to the inside - left to right - with all the real but unnecessary details in their diagram.

Of course, I imagined the concentric circle diagram he and I were discussing as the "green sheet" :)

And thank you for sharing your adventure and analysis in Gothic history. Very interesting and with so few words. That, mi amigo, es otro green sheet :)
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Sep 17, 2021 5:39 pm

The funny thing about those green sheets is that I just chose to make them green because ordinary white sheets had a tendency to disappear - and I had once bought a lot of extra-thick green A4 sheets for some forgotten purpose so it was quite logical to use them for my grammatical summaries.
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:27 pm

Saturday I finished my latest painting (see below), and I also visited our local art museum, which in this month can boast of a resident artists' colony from New York called Flux. And after that I started a mini musical project: I have a theme collection in collection to my music collection, and I have just finished listening to the letter B (from Bacalov and the Bachs to the Danish composer Børresen), so I had several pages with corrections lying arouund , and now it was time to write the themes nicely with black ink and integrate them in the theme collection at the appropriate places - and that took until 3 o'clock in the night (so for once no goodnight reading).

And then the natural assumption would be that I didn't study languages at all, but that would be false. In these covid times even some long discussions in English with the American artists count as language maintenance, but while I did the computer work with the theme corrections I also found a quite interesting thing to listen to at Youtube: a series of videos about cosmology and related topics in Catalan. I must have listened to at least two hours in Catalan without having any problems understanding anything the man said. And the man has a very appropriate name: Joan Anton Català.

CAT: Ha anomenat la seva sèrie "Ciència in confinament", el que fa referència al tancament sever a què va ser sotmesa Espanya - i on Catalunya va ser una de les regions més afectades. En aquesta situació va optar per fer un gran nombre de conferències sobre astronomia i altres coses. La primera secció que vaig veure tractava de la matèria fosca i l’energia fosca, i després vaig veure una secció sobre el pobre Plutó, que ja no és un planeta, així com una secció sobre la formació dels planetes, cadascuna que durava poc menys d’una hora. I hi ha molts episodis més esperant-me durant els períodes en què no escolto música.

SP: Pero no puedo negar completamente que hay largos períodos en los que escucho bastante música (musica clásica instrumental) mientras trabajo con letras o en mi computadora mientras veo televisión con subtítulos. Hoy, por ejemplo, vi un episodio de la serie "Españoles en el mundo" de las Islas Feroe ...

IC: ... þar maður talar tungumál sem er nátengt íslensku en ekki er íslensk. En þeir hafa nýlega drepið 1.400 hnúfubaka þar uppi, svo það er meira en nóg að ég geti lesið tungumál þeirra - ég ætla ekki að læra færeysku..

I have done more thing that has something to do with Spain: since I now have entered the letter C in my music collection I was immediately confronted with music by Juan Bautista José Cabanilles and Antonio de Cabezón (and his brother Hernán) and the Italian Capirola, and I have added a fair amount of items to those composers recently. Besides some of my old theme renderings weren't good, mainly because they where done while I still only had the music on cassettes, and you can destroy those if you roll back and forth to listen to something repeatedly. Now I have the whole thing on files, and with Audacity I can easily listen several times to a theme so now I can correct the old errors - and sometimes I can even cheat and find the themes at the IMSLP site where I also have stored my own compositions. That took several hours. However since I watched Spaniards on the Faroe islands with subtitles (in Spanish on TVE text TV page 888) at the same time my conscience is not entirely pitch black.

Apart from that I have worked with a text about the Ordovician in Indonesian. OK OK, I know that I wrote that I ought to cull daily-life vocabulary from my Assimil language guide, but I couldn't just leave that article unread- after all I had spent precious printer ink on producing it !

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Iversen
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Sep 20, 2021 12:39 pm

I have been mentioning "Lingua e storia dei Goti" by G.Scardigli a few times, and this morning I decided to finish it - not all 400 pages, because there is a large quotation in Latin (a letter from some bishop to comebody else elucidating some points in Ulfila's bible translation) - but nevertheless some 330 pages in dry academic Italian. I don't mind Latin, but about the last thing I would read in that language would be a theological discussion about some irrelevant details in a bible version I can't even read.

In the Italian part of the book there were a few really interesting informations, like for instance that Theoderik the great (who ruled Italy for a time after the demise of the Western Roman empire) ordered a bilingual bible edition (Latin + Ostrogothic), but it has been lost. And then there was a discussion about the Crimean Goths. There are a few references to them from casual visitors, like the Flemish ambulant monk Rubruk (Ruysbruck) who mentioned that they have "proprium ydioma" and even used the term "Goti" in referencing them. After him Giosafatte Barbaro from Venezia, who had two Germans in his travel group, and he noticed that they could communicate with those 'Gotthi' - he couldn't. But first and foremost the Flemish diplomat and writer Ogier-Ghiselin de Busbecq, who even collected some words from them and quoted those words in a diplomatic letter, which was published after his death.

Since some of the honoured readers of these lines may not have seen the complete list of words I include them below. As you can see the words have been divided into recognizable and not recognizable ones. And since de Busbecq was Flemish and knew Latin those last ones might be originally Gothic, but they could also come from some other language in the region. You may be puzzled by for instance "schuualt" (= mors, death) in the comprehensible list, but we have got that word in Danish as "sult" and "svält" in Swedish (=hunger) - but if you hunger long enough you will of course die. The other words should be recognizable to people who know a few modern Germanic languages AND a wee bit of Latin. In the other list you see "iel". Scardigli discusses the possibility that an initial "h'" has been lost, and then you would know the word from "(to) heal" in English.

By the way, Scardigli is worried that Busbecq may inadvertently have misrepresented the words by using his own homemade (and Flemish inspired) orthography, but that's all we have got - and my feeling is that he did a quite good job.

But there is another problem: even though the Crimean 'Goths' (who now have been absorbed into the surrounding populations) did have a lineage back to the Goths from the early migration era, there is a timespan of one thousand years betwen Ulfila's bible and the wordlist of de Busbecq, and you can't expect everything to look the same. Scardigli actually tries to make some morphological inferences from the material, and he comes to the conclusion that the language has been simplifying its morphology in about the same way as for instance his native Flemish (which has continued its simplifcation after de Busbecq's death) - but there is simply not enough evidence to reconstruction the grammar of Crimean Gothic. It remains a tantalizing glimpse into a time capsule which was at the end of its tether already at de Busbecq's time, and now has gone.

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