The phonology and morphology of foreign words in Gothic revisited

Abstract

The present paper focuses on foreign names and loan words in the Gothic text corpus. The names are mostly Hebrew in origin but were transferred to Gothic through Greek. Their phonetic, phonological and graphemic adaption will be discussed in light of the close connection between the Wulfilian and Greek alphabets. In addition, we will raise the question and discuss whether some names are not fully adapted to the Gothic inflection but remain Greek in form, as well as why foreign words are sometimes not assigned to the inflectional class which would appear to be the most natural one.