Looking for people which speak Gothic for Gothic radio

[GothicSp]

Hello there,

I 'm planning to start a radio in the Gothic language. I don't know if it will ever be revived, but I want to contribute to it, and one of those ways is by offering a radio in the language. The problem is that I will need speakers, so I wonder if anyone here might be interested?

GothicSp

[LoneWolf]

Uhmmm... I don't mean to put your hopes down but it's unlikely this project of yours will ever work, at least not without rewriting the whole language and creating new terms and patching up many grey areas in the morphology, syntax, phonology and lexicon. This is a dead language with a limited corpus and no native speakers to tell you how things were really pronounced, inflected or conjugated, etc. You're only option to make this a speakable language is the use whatever fragments linguists have gathered from the manuscripts and fill in yourself whatever gaps are left in the grammar.

I'll be honest, we do have quite a few texts from which we can reconstruct the language, such as Wulfila's Bible, but even those are insufficient to build a full picture of the language.

And if I may say, you won't find in this day and age speakers of the language. At best you'll find linguists and other scholars who have a working knowledge in Gothic and can read it. Reading and speaking are two entirely different things.
That being said, if I may make a suggestion to you, instead of looking for speakers, why not learn the language yourself and then you can play around with it and make up a 'New Gothic'?

As for me I can't really read Gothic although I have been studying Indo-European linguistics for some time and therefore know a thing or two about ancient Germanic languages.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

[GothicSp]

Uhmmm... I don't mean to put your hopes down but it's unlikely this project of yours will ever work, at least not without rewriting the whole language and creating new terms and patching up many grey areas in the morphology, syntax, phonology and lexicon. This is a dead language with a limited corpus and no native speakers to tell you how things were really pronounced, inflected or conjugated, etc. You're only option to make this a speakable language is the use whatever fragments linguists have gathered from the manuscripts and fill in yourself whatever gaps are left in the grammar.

I'll be honest, we do have quite a few texts from which we can reconstruct the language, such as Wulfila's Bible, but even those are insufficient to build a full picture of the language.

And if I may say, you won't find in this day and age speakers of the language. At best you'll find linguists and other scholars who have a working knowledge in Gothic and can read it. Reading and speaking are two entirely different things.
That being said, if I may make a suggestion to you, instead of looking for speakers, why not learn the language yourself and then you can play around with it and make up a 'New Gothic'?

As for me I can't really read Gothic although I have been studying Indo-European linguistics for some time and therefore know a thing or two about ancient Germanic languages.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Thanks for your reply. Well, actually everything you say is what I already know. We don't only have what Wulfila delivered to us. There are special academic books in which academic linguists have gathered loan-words from Gothic and words delivered to us by Latin texts. We also have material from the Skeireins and I think that we can't reconstruct Gaulish, we also can't reconstruct Etruscan or Phoenician, but for Gothic we have quite a lot of words and morphology delivered to us. Fortunately we have other old Germanic languages which were quite similar to Gothic and we don't want to lend words from them, but we can base the grammar a bit on those languages. I have currently gathered all other people interested in this project and I think that we actually could make a chance, as there are quite motivated people to learn Gothic. Unlike Phoenician or Etruscan, we can actually create a new Gothic by approaching the old Gothic language best as possible and we can indeed fill in the gaps with assumptions of what they were most likely like. What I 'm currently doing is replacing words for which we don't know the meaning with alternatives which are actually present in Gothic, this will make our modern Gothic having a more dense vocabulary than other languages, but we stay closer to the original in this way, (there are as you say no speakers left so we don't know what it originally was like anyway) and we can use other Old Germanic languages or existing Gothic words for compound words if we really don't know how to form a new word. There actually is a Wikipedia in Gothic which I currently use for neologisms for which they already have come up with a meaning. I 'm also in contact with one of the creators of the Gothic wikipedia for a revival of the language. I just think that it would be a fun experiment for us and if you dream enough about something and other people get the same dream, it's possible that it will become true.

The first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is already translated into Gothic and I want to contribute with some other translations in order to give future speakers quite some material to use for learning how to read and use a modern reconstructed Gothic.