Bennett William H. An Introduction to the Gothic Language

The Modern Language Association of America, 1980. — 207 p. — (Introductions to Older Languages 2).An introduction to the Gothic Language has been written specifically for beginning students. It presents twenty-seven graded readings, each accompanied by a vocabulary and an explanation ofgrammatical details; the final chapter provides a sample of the Codex Argenteus. Among the readings, the firstseven are in effect preliminary exercises;the text on page 8, for example, contains thirty-seven case and number forms ofmasculine o-declension nouns and fifteen of sa. The remaining twenty readings represent the Gothic Bible and the Skeireins. The external history ofthe language is outlined in Chapters 2 to 7, the elements of phonetics in Chapters 8 to 10, and the essentials of phonologic and analogic change in Chapter 11. The phonologic history of Gothic extendsthrough Chapters 12 to 27. The terminology used in designating inflectional categories reflects an Indo-European ratherthan a purely Germanic point of view.