Talk:Gothic language

ʍ or hʷ

This article uses these two symbols seemingly interchangeably to represent 𐍈 (ƕ). Seeing as the ʍ symbol is notoriously ambiguous, it should probably be avoided in favour of using hʷ everywhere (and this notation makes the relationship between it and the other two labialized sounds more apparent). ~2025-31340-95 (talk) 01:43, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

Question on adding citation for A Barnstormer in Oz

After reading the addition of use of Gothic in the fictional language in A Barnstormer in Oz, and how citation is still needed for this, I was looking into the book and found that the language indeed seems based on Gothic, examples are Wulfla (little wolf, page 12), gund (cancer), and page 9 of the book straightly mentions how Hank Stover sees characters on a clock in a room resembling those which he saw in a book on the Gothic language.

I have tried to look into interviews with Farmer from either 1982 or after and what's still available but unfortunately so far I have not been able to find direct mentions yet or questions on his use of the language in this book. The question I want to ask here is that Wikipedia should use secondary sources and primary sources should only very scarcely be used, but if we can not find information on this mentioned in any secondary sources, would it make sense that we cite how he mentions this in the book itself or would this be problematic considering primary source use, including in the case where we can not find this mention in secondary sources? Bokareis (talk) 22:55, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

I added the citation since I do see that in certain conditions primary sources can be used (primary sources) but rewrote the part from the previous editor so that the book itself could be cited. I am however not sure that mentioning the words for certain English terms (which are very clearly Gothic inspired) alongside with the Gothic terms themselves, is correct during the citation. Bokareis (talk) 01:49, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Problem with Heinrich May claim and finding citation

So in regard to this part of the article:

Reports of the discovery of other parts of Ulfilas's Bible have not been substantiated. Heinrich May in 1968 claimed to have found in England twelve leaves of a palimpsest containing parts of the Gospel of Matthew.^{[clarification needed][citation needed]}

I was looking if I could find which Heinrich May this could be and I stumbled upon a German librarian and medievalist called Otto Heinrich May who lived from 1887 (Bremerhaven, Germany) until 1977 (Kassel, Germany). (See his German Wikipedia page) His work Kriegs- und Nachkriegsschicksale der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek in Hannover (1939–1950). Nach Tagebuchvermerken, Aktenauszügen, Erlebnissen und Erkenntnissen. was published in the year 1968. This year does match the year of the claim in the currently added part with no citation, but I am rather confused how a book about the library of Niedersächsen would contain this claim. However I am not able to find any other books or articles which he would have published in this year.

This book can't be consulted online and someone would either need to purchase this book or borrow it from a library (in Germany?) in order to research if the claim can be found back in this book and the book could be added as a citation.

Leaving this here so that hopefully someone reading this can do something useful with this information. Bokareis (talk) 23:55, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

The library of my alma mater has a copy of the reprint. I'm happy to have a quick look at it next time I go there, but it's not likely to be very soon. --Pfold (talk) 17:32, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

That would be great! :)

I see that it's a book of only about 103 pages so hopefully it should be not too difficult to find if this is the source in this book. If the library happens to have more works of Otto Heinrich May we might have more luck if there's anything more from 1968 he has written, but it might also be the case that what's mentioned online is already all of his work and this book is really only possible source of this. I can continue looking if I can find other Heinrich May's but this really seems to be the only one which this excerpt applies to. Bokareis (talk) 19:40, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Does this help? - https://www.modeemi.fi/~david/Codex_Argenteus/Cod_Arg_Bib.html (look under "May") --Pfold (talk) 12:51, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Oh very good work, it seems like this is indeed what we were looking for. Seems like this is in Volume VIII (2013)

ISBN 978-3-935869-19-5 Spirensia & Synoptica, as https://www.gotica.de/minora.html indicates. Then we only need someone able to verify this being written on those pages 73-74 in the website which you linked, and then we can append this reference to this part of the article. Perhaps we also need to add a bit of information there on the suspicions of this being a hoax and why. Bokareis (talk) 14:36, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

New source for the Goths in India part

With the claims of Konow and Krause in regard to Irila and Cita I was trying to find more critical sources on these claims, as the hypothesis of Goths in India seems to say the least, unlikely to me. I did find the following paper by Sundeep S. Jhutti, see page 82 in regard to Konow's claim where Jhutti goes in depth on the Goths in India claims: https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp127_getes.pdf I have checked and it seems like more articles on Wikipedia use the Sino Platonic papers for sourcing, so in that regard we might be able to use this.

On one hand I think it might be important that we incorporate something from this in some way, but I am not entirely sure on this source.

At first I wanted to add this myself, but I am too uncertain on what would be best to add from this source if we use it. One of my problems with the source is how Gothic language names would end up to be used by Gatas which, according to Jhutti are actually Massageteans, Alans or Jhats living in the north of India who were either related to Goths or have related customs to Goths, while he supports the claim that the Goths were an Asianic tribe. Are there actually reliable sources which locate the Goths as an Asianic tribe? Reliable sources seem to locate them in Europe.

And that's my problem overall, on one hand this is the only critical source on part of Konow's claim, but this source itself has its problems. Can someone skim through or read the relevant parts of this and give their opinion? Bokareis (talk) 14:47, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

Sino Platonic papers is usually a problematic source. By its own description, it specializes in providing an outlet for "research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished". The paper by Jhutti seems to fit that pattern. From what I can tell after a brief skimming, his linguistic argumentation is overall naive, to put it mildly. It's basically just drawing connections based on perceived superficial similarity of names and then jumbles that all together, so "Getae", "Massagetae", "Goths", "Jatta", "Yuezhi" end up all being somehow the same. That's not a serious linguistic publication. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:46, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for your response and look into the source! Yes, I do agree with your assessment of the source, my impression is as well that Jhutti doesn't have sound linguistic arguments while . I guess that it depends entirely on the author and kind of paper in the Sino Platonic papers regarding which ones get used as a source, since when I was looking at it some weeks ago it seemed that some Wikipedia articles do use it, but like you said it usually is problematic. When I was looking for the author himself I also had a hard time to find credentials.

We'll have to disregard this source then and if anything else can be found we might be able to add some contrary viewpoints to this. Bokareis (talk) 10:01, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

On the consonant table

So yesterday, I updated the consonant table since I felt like the original looked a little cluttered and hard to parse. It was reversed because of "factual errors" and I'm curious what these errors were? I assume one of them was using ʍ instead of hʷ, and maybe showing the labial fricatives as being either bilabial or labiodental? Other than that I think everything else was accurate. ICommandeth (talk) 23:23, 25 August 2026 (UTC)

Well for one thing β is not an allophone of φ, it’s an allophone of b.—-Ermenrich (talk) 13:45, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

But that's not misrepresented in either version of the table, is it? I take it we are talking about the table in the "phonology" section, not the one in "Alphabet and transliteration", so let's compare previous version vs ICommandeth's version . Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:02, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

My main issue is with what happened to the voiced obstruents. The original table clearly spells out the phonemes in slashes and their allophones in brackets. In the proposed revision, the stop realizations are given priority over the fricatives which come in parentheses, a notation that – incorrectly – implies a marginal status (in many articles, in fact, we do use parentheses for marginal phonemes). Actually, the conventional choice of /b, d ,g/ to represent these phonemes is arbitrary and one could just as well use /β, ð, ɣ/. Also, the labiodentals get undue prominence when the prose following the table describes the labial fricatives as bilabial in the first place. –Austronesier (talk) 17:34, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

The parenthesis represented allophones, not marginal phonemes. Also the bilabial fricatives are described as having possibly been labiodental instead, so the change there is to show that it could have been one or the other ICommandeth (talk) 17:40, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

Both [d] and [ð] are allophones. Why is one in parentheses, while the other isn't? Why replace a precise table with one that partially discards this precision? –Austronesier (talk) 17:57, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

Because having boxes that cross over columns and rows looks cluttered, at least I think so. Also if /d/ is the phoneme that can be either [d] or [ð], I think having the latter in parenthesis is fine since the implication is that the former is the phoneme. ICommandeth (talk) 18:34, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

I had some concerns about the consonant table edits, which are not entirely the same as Austronesier's. Regarding allophones, I agree with Austronesier that just using parentheses and not boxes doesn't make it clear what (ð) is an allophone of: that exists regardless in the case of (ŋ), but I think overall it's helpful to have that mark in the table of how allophones are grouped. Something I find more clearly objectionable is the separation of coronal consonants into "dental" and "alveolar" columns: I expect it to be difficult to obtain specific evidence of their exact place of articulation, and the sources are not in fact always this specific or unanimous: Marchand 1973:33-34 (§23.2.a-b) describes /t/ and /d/ as "articulated anywhere from the inter-dental to the pre-palatal points of articulation", and places /t/, /d/, /þ/, /n/, /l/, /r/ all in the same "Dental" column in his chart on page 94 (while noting that "all these sounds are only relative, and that the designations "labial", "velar", "dental", cover a lot of territory. We must be vague in our definition of the phonetic value of the signs [...] we can determine the relative position and some of the articulatory features of these phonemes, but this is as far as we can go"). Miller 2019 does at times use the term "dental" in connection with the stop and fricative phonemes /t/, /d/, /þ/, but groups all coronal consonant phonemes into a common column in his chart on page 26 (§2.3); I do not see any place where Miller specifies any Gothic consonant as alveolar. Balg 1883 (translating Braune 1880) applies the term "dental" not only to /t/, /d/, /þ/, but also to /s/, /z/ (pp. 28-34). As for the other changes, I thought that removing the orthography/transcription from the table could be helpful, since including it does make it more cluttered; using a split column for Velar (Plain Labialised) is another change that I thought seemed good. As for the bilabial/labiodental issue, while there is scholarly discussion of the possibility of labiodental realizations of the phonemes (Marchand 1973 surprisingly seems to extends this even to the labial stops and nasal), I feel like the uncertainty of this, and the absence of rule-governed allophonic variation between the possible variants (unlike the voiced stop-voiced fricative variation), makes it minor enough that I'm not sure it should be shown in the table.--Urszag (talk) 19:26, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

I see your point with the coronal argument, no rebuttals there. The bilabial/labiodental thing too is fair. I guess then the main issue is allophones, but I think other info in the article would make it clear that [ð] is an allophone of /d/ and not /θ/ for instance. ICommandeth (talk) 21:56, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

What would opinions be on just removing the allophones [β ð ɣ ŋ x] and using partially broken box divisions as in the consonant table at Spanish phonology?--Urszag (talk) 23:38, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

Allophones in consonant tables frequently cause trouble and make them quite difficult to read. Unless the realizations are truly in free variation, they should probably be left to explanatory notes below the table, with the table then only showing the phonemes. A separate table could also be provided for the allophones (Pirahã language § Consonants does a great job of this). In either case, the bracket muck in the main table can then be avoided too, though the orthographic pairings should be in ⟨angle brackets⟩. ~ oklopfer (💬︎) 23:53, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

I honestly don't think that the allophones cause much trouble at all in this case, considering how they're outnumbered by the phonemes. Having an entirely separate consonant chart to include only a handful of allophones seems excsessice ICommandeth (talk) 03:36, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

Took a look at the new consonant table and I still think it looks way too cluttered and confusing, with all the different boxes that cross over the columns and rows ICommandeth (talk) 20:41, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

I thought Oklopfer's version was fine, but I'm also OK with the alternative version you prefer.--Urszag (talk) 19:55, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

Getting rid of the cross-manner boxes was definitely an improvement to the layout, as it gave us the benefit of being able to split voiceless and voiced consonants into separate rows, as has become increasingly conventionalized on our charts. ~ oklopfer (💬︎) 20:54, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

In Gary Miller's 2019 Oxford Gothic Grammar, he uses exactly the same convention as used now (with allophones in parentheses), so I will stop whining about that ;) But note that in Table 2.2, he uses fricative /ɣ/ for the phonemic representation of the velar voiced obstruent and treats the stop [g] as the allophonic variant. The current table has no citations. I suggest to follow Miller's model and explicitly cite him as a source for the revised table. –Austronesier (talk) 19:01, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me!—-Ermenrich (talk) 19:12, 2 September 2026 (UTC)