The Gothic Word

The entire field or Germanic philology 1a united by a single overriding fact, that all of the Germanic languages have a common root in a single language. That language is today called Proto-Germanic by scholars of the English-speaking world, Urgermanisch by German-speaking scholars, and urgermanska by the Swedes. This proto-language is unattested in any documents, but the science of comparative linguistics has allowed us to reconstruct many or its root forms. These root forms may in turn be used both for work in Indo-European comparative linguistics on the one hand, and for pedagogical aids and explanatory devices illuminating the prehistorical sound changes in Germanic languages on the other, that is, for work both backwards and forwards in time. In such work in comparative Germanic linguistics, the prime-importance of Gothic becomes immediately and almost obtrusively apparent. The state ot the Gothic language in the Gothic biblical records is about three centuries older than the earliest extensive attestations in any of the other Germanic languages, and about a century older than the beginning or the High German language, if we accept the middle or the fifth century as the time of the High German sound shift. Gothic retains word endings of very great antiquity, endings which have been lost in all other Germanic languages, yet which enable us to explain many later Germanic phenomena which are but reflexes or cognate endings in those languages.