The Gothic Language: Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Readings by Irmengard Rauch (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.2, 2005 539 The Gothic Language: Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Readings. By Irmengard Rauch. (Berkeley Models of Grammar, 5) Bern, Berlin, and Brussels: Peter Lang. 2003. xxii+192 pp. ?39.40. ISBN 0-8204-3720-4. At firstsight, this book appears welcome, providing a useful collection of texts, with facsimiles of the principal source texts, the Codex Argenteus, the Skeireins, and the relevant pages of Busbecq's letters (fol. 136 recto and verso, which contains the sum of our knowledge of Crimean Gothic). Sadly, it reveals itselfto be a badly focused and ill-written amalgam of information that errs at both extremes: sophisticated schol? arship sits beside trivial and poorly expressed description, with unreliable, misspelt, and inconsistent examples. This looks like rushed editing, and a second edition could rectifyat least some of the damage. Anyone familiar with the well-worn paths of Gothic philology should welcome new approaches, because, although they often describe the 'facts' less adequately, they usually attempt to go beyond the merely descriptive to provide interpretations. The book promises the application to the familiar Gothic data ofmodern and even cur? rent linguistic theories: the laryngeal theory, the glottalic theory, underspecification theory, and optimality theory. These theories require some introduction regarding, in particular, the assumptions that underlie them, and the shortcomings in tradi? tional theory which they are intended to overcome. Unfortunately, this opportunity is missed. It might have been better to dispense with the Readings and Glossary sections, which constitute half the book, in order to do more justice to methodology. Moreover, the material is less accurate than it should be. Phonology is treated briskly,with greater emphasis on morphology. After 96 pages on grammar come a selection of texts (pp. 97-153) and a glossary to them (pp. 15583 ) that sensibly includes the proper names. The bibliography, especially the author's contributions, refutes the preface's assertion (p. xvii) that research into Gothic in the last fiftyyears has been 'moribund', but naturally, there is scant hope of discovering new primary material: even the 188th leaf of the Codex Argenteus that turned up at Speyer in 1970 contributed only one new word (p. 8). Some important research is omitted, notably that of Richard D'Alquen (Gothic AI andA U: A Possible Solution (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1974)), whose treatment ofthe Gothic digraphs cleverly combines chronological transmission and regional in? fluence in his interpretation of the sixth-century 'Ostrogothic' digraph spellings (ai), (au) as monophthongs, regardless of length. The original (lost) Visigothic language may have had both diphthongal and monophthongal sounds in opposition to each other in the relevant lexemes, but we do not know how they were spelt in Visigothic manuscripts. Biblical Greek, the textual 'matrix' for Gothic, must already have reduced its inventory ofsounds, as nowadays in Modern Greek, where 77, t,v,et,and 01are all pronounced monophthongally as [i:], while ai is [e] and ov is rendered [u:]. There is no reference, either,to several valuable Internet sites. While such sites undoubtedly 'decay', in the short term they provide access to material unavailable in libraries with poor holdings in Germanic philology. Historical work on the Goths is also ignored. The text has been written with such compression that it is sometimes difficult to understand, or misleading. Thus, possibly by analogy with 'Hispanic', the word 'Germanic' is applied to speakers of a Germanic tongue, e.g. 'such non-Germanics as the Finns, Balts [. . .]' (p. 1); but this implies ethnicity. 'Germanic speakers' is still preferable, whatever their ethnic origins. 'Gothic frequently is the designated prototype ofthe Germanic languages' (p. 10): but Gothic is not a reconstructed prototype; it can representa prototype because it is the oldest surviving Germanic language that is relatively well attested in continuous text. The genetic relationship of Gothic to other Germanic languages is oddly described: 'privatively it yields no consonant gemination ' (p. 11): this seems to mean that Gothic lacks consonant gemination, which 54-0 Reviews separates it fromthe other languages. Moreover, the examples cited have been altered: the adjective plaqus should appear in this form, not as *plaques (cf. Mark 13. 28). An example of Gothic proclisis is taken from 11 Corinthians 8. 18, where the original...