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The phonology of Gothic vowels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Theo Vennemann
Theo Vennemann*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

Few languages have received more phonological investigation than Biblical Gothic, and with fewer generally accepted results. Disagreement on the consonantism centers around certain details, but in the vowel system it concerns the very heart of the matter. Posited inventories range from five to twelve vowel segments, not counting diphthongs. With the century-old battle for monophthongal interpretation of ai, au, iu finally decided (or very nearly so), a new conflict has arisen during the last twenty years about the phonological status of vowel length: philologically oriented linguists posit a length contrast, while structuralists have come to agree that length has no distinctive function in the vowel system. These disagreements suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong with the methodology of these investigations. The philologists have over-emphasized the etymological evidence, the structuralists the graphemic evidence. The present study considers these kinds of evidence but is mostly concerned with the phonological evidence: relevant parts of the phonological component of Gothic are reconstructed and are compared to the grammar of its parent language. It is found that vowel length is distinctive in Gothic, functioning critically in several of the most important vowel rules. The resulting phonemic inventory is in foreign words. (The length of the asterisked units is proved; their monophthongal values are here adopted, but /iw ay aw aN/ remain possible interpretations.) Phonetically, Gothic has in foreign words.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 1971, pp. 90 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I am indebted to the following scholars who read this article in manuscript and whose comments led to many improvements: William H. Bennett, William Bright, Ernst A. Ebbinghaus, Winfred P. Lehmann, Burckhard Mohr, Herbert Penzl, Robert P. Stockwell, Joseph B. Voyles, and Terence H. Wilbur. I am, of course, alone responsible for the position taken in this work, and all remaining errors are mine. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Iselind M. Hanewald of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, who, while still a graduate student at UCLA, did much of the basic research embodied in this article, and without whose sustained interest in this work it would never have been completed. Thanks are further due the editorial staff of this journal who, miraculously, were able to keep track of my numerous additions and amendments to the original manuscript. A short version of this paper was read as ‘Linguistik und Philologie’ at the University of Munich, July 9, 1970, and another as ‘Reconstruction of phonemes vs. reconstruction of rules: on vowel length in Gothic’ at the December 1970 meeting of the LSA in Washington, D.C.

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