Just two briefly mention two substrate hypotheses which I’ve come across in the last 24 hours: Theo Vennemann posits a Semitic substrate for Proto-Germanic, an encounter made possible by Phoenician colonization of the North Sea area. Among the supposed loanwords are the names of the Germanic gods Pol and Baldur, none other than the Semitic [...]
While my understanding of spoken Danish has now surpassed my understanding of spoken Swedish (it’s the Swedes who speak as if they have potatoes in their mouths!), I still love jokes about how Danish is completely unintelligible. I got a lot of laughs out of this bit (Parts One and Two) from the Norwegian comedy [...]
LanguageHat often posts about poetry, and I should get to do so once in a while as well. After all, along with what languages are (grammar and lexicon), and who uses them (their population of speakers), there’s also the matter of what they are good for. Sure, that most often means conversation, but towards a more eternal edifice it means literature, and within it poetry is the very exploitation of a language’s possibilities. That’s why I’m very passionate about the verse of Pia Tafdrup, which showed me that Danish is much more than the seemingly random succession of schwa, /y/, and glottal stop that I first heard it to be.
Despite the fact that I speak one member natively, the Germanic language family has generally seemed fairly opaque to me. Of the Indo-European languages, high school studies in Latin pulled me to Romance, and residency in Ukraine towards Slavonic. However, one of the neat things about studying at University of Helsinki is that a Swedish [...]
The “Early Indo-European Languages Online” site at the A. Richard Diebold Center for Indo-European Language and Culture, Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (what a mouthful) has now added little Gothic and Hittite courses to the already abundant materials they offered. For some reason the Gothic course isn’t linked to from the main [...]
Nancy Thuleen, a teacher of German language to undergraduates at University of Wisconsin – Madison, is also a fan of Gothic. As part of her studies in a graduate Gothic course, she wrote three texts which should prove interesting to neophytes: Gothic Nominal Declension: Variation in Proper Nouns (written with Mike Lind), ‘Gothic Miscellany: Vowels, [...]
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the online Wright grammar of the Gothic language, I should also mention that the Gothic Bible is online as well. The Wulfila project, ‘a small digital library dedicated to the study of the Gothic language and Old Germanic languages in general’, provides the Gothic text with English translation [...]
The Germanic Lexicon Project at University of Pennsylvania is in the processing of providing Wright’s Grammar of the Gothic Language (Oxford University Press, 1910) online. The entire book is available in image format, and an uncorrected text is available in HTML. I’ve often consulted Wright in my university library, and considering its age it is [...]
Helmut Richter has written a lightweight short history of the German language, starting from the second Germanic sound shift. It may prove interesting to speakers of English who will begin study of this relative more distant than one might usually imagine. He has also written a companion article, ‘Questions and Answers about German Dialects’.