Tag: Gothic

Illyrians Still on the Map

The Illyrians were a group of Indo-European tribes, who once inhabited western Balkans.

Starting from the 2nd century AD the Illyrians were gradually wiped off from the map;  and The Illyrians were mentioned for the last time in the 7th century. With the disintegration of the Roman Empire, Gothic and Hunnic tribes raided the Balkan peninsula, forcing many Illyrians to seek refuge in the highlands. With the arrival of the Slavs in the 6th century, most Illyrians were Slavicized.

Follow the link to see where the Illyrians once lived.

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Ancient Alphabets Made Easy

I was developing years ago verb conjugation for Ancient Scandinavian, Runic Swedish, and Gothic languages.

All these ancient — now extinct — languages were written in a an ancient script more that a thousand years ago. Although the grammar books transliterated the texts to modern alphabet, I wanted to also write the verbs forms in the original script.

The Gothic alphabet as it appears in the Gothic Bible of Wulfila
Runic inscriptions on a stone

Years ago that was hard. Either there was no font that supported Runic or Gothic scripts. Or there was no standard for encoding them.

Fortunately things have changed, and modern webbrowsers make use of such standards as webfonts and Unicode. Thanks to that I get the Runic and Gothic texts written as they should.

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Extinct Languages

An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers.

Basically there are two ways that a language becomes extinct:

  1. The speakers switch to another language.
  2. The language evolves so much that it’s considered a different language.

Among the extinct or nearly extinct languages, the users of Verbix can conjugate Latin and Gothic verbs.

In WikiVerb there’s now also a page dedicated to extinct languages.

Links to go:

 

Gothic Language

A bishop called Wulfila (Ulfilas) is the man that translated the Bible to the Gothic language. Although the Gothic tribes were assimilated to other peoples and the language is no more spoken, the work of Wulfila is still very important.

The Gothic bible is the far most important written source of an East-Germanic language that got extinct more than a 1000 years ago.

More info: