AH. Challenge: Gothic Mullahs

With a POD after the rise of Islam how do we end up with Shia Muslim Goths. At the time the only surving Gothic population was in Crimea*

*At least linguistic Gothic.

Fine.

Shia. Muslim. Gothic-speaking. Goths.

Well, the first is Muslim Goths. That's easy, 'cause there were in OTL.

For whatever reason, the Cordoban caliphate doesn't fall. Or at least not much.

Then, when the Ottomans or any equivalent grabs all the Mediterranean under its influence or direct rule, and demands the Cordobans to follow suit as there must be only a Caliph in Sunni Islam, they refuse - and after a meeting with the Persian ambassador, the Cordoban Caliph announces that he recognizes Ali as the true successor of Muhammad, thus making any of the successors of Abu Bakr invalid. That includes the *Ottoman sultans. And that makes the Cordobans Shia Muslim Goths.

Finally, after some centuries an equivalent of modern Nationalism gets roots and there is a discovery an exaltation of the Gothic roots - including the language, which is brought back and taught at schools.

Mission completed.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
Fine.

Shia. Muslim. Gothic-speaking. Goths.

Well, the first is Muslim Goths. That's easy, 'cause there were in OTL.

For whatever reason, the Cordoban caliphate doesn't fall. Or at least not much.

Then, when the Ottomans or any equivalent grabs all the Mediterranean under its influence or direct rule, and demands the Cordobans to follow suit as there must be only a Caliph in Sunni Islam, they refuse - and after a meeting with the Persian ambassador, the Cordoban Caliph announces that he recognizes Ali as the true successor of Muhammad, thus making any of the successors of Abu Bakr invalid. That includes the *Ottoman sultans. And that makes the Cordobans Shia Muslim Goths.

Finally, after some centuries an equivalent of modern Nationalism gets roots and there is a discovery an exaltation of the Gothic roots - including the language, which is brought back and taught at schools.

Mission completed.


Impressive, just one problem, there isn't enough Gothic sources to reconstruct the language.
 
There wasn't a unified Basque language in the 19th cent either, but that didn't stop Sabino Arana from inventing one.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
There wasn't a unified Basque language in the 19th cent either, but that didn't stop Sabino Arana from inventing one.

That's standardfication that isn't possible with Gothic, there simply lack enough Gothic texts to recreate the language in any form. At best you could find a few hundred words of Gothic origin and use them to alter an already existing Germanic languages*, but the result wouldn't be Gothic.

*Maybe a dead one with larger sources of text, prefereble Old Nordic which is believed to be the closes relative to East Germanic.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
What about the Gothic Bible? Aren't enough parts of it preserved to serve as a Gothic Rosetta?

Rosetta serves as a usual translating tool, but to recreate a languages it's not good enough, try to recreate English with only King James Bible and Modern German, while we could get something which looked superficial like english, it wouldn't be English, not even 17th century English.
 
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Leo Caesius

Banned
Language revival on that scale has only succeeded once in history (Israel, and for good reasons - you had a sacred language, and a massive group of people coming from all parts of the world without a common language). As it is, most communities have severe difficulties protecting surviving languages from dying out, let alone raising long-dead ones from the grave.
 
Well, as I said earlier, what if the Gothic dhimmis (if there are any) decided to preserve the language? The only way I can think of something like that happening, though, is by adapting Gothic to the Arabic alphabet. I will volunteer myself for this job, and hopefully I create something satisfactory. Warning though: if your computer can't handle Arabic, then you will see boxes on your computer unless you install a font that can handle it.
 
Update: I have managed to get something close to an orthography for Gothic using the Arabic alphabet. However, before I do so, I will need to test out some fonts to make sure that the board can handle them. If you want to know what they are (so you can check your computers to see if you have it installed), the fonts are Calibri and Arial Unicode MS (since the university upgraded to Office 2007 :mad: and thus making Calibri the default font for MS Word).

A couple of pointers:
*I'm assuming that the alphabet will be written in the Nastaliq calligraphic style. However, I'm introducing a difference whereas the original Arabic "kaf" and the Persian/Nastaliq "kaf" co-exist (the original Arabic "kaf" has been assigned a different phonetic value). As such, the Arabic "kaf" can only be used in final or isolated form (it does not join with other letters).
*I'm also using Western (Standard) Arabic numerals in the orthography, even though it's just as likely that Eastern Arabic numerals (as per Ottoman Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, et cetera) would be used.
*Also, I know that people are going to kill me for using Wiki as a basis for research, but in order to figure out the sounds of Gothic, I Wikied Gothic, and it gave me some semblance of the sounds (from what has already been reconstructed, as meagre as the original sources are, though in ATL there may be more) of the language.
*I can already tell you that there is going to be MASSIVE redundancy with some of the letters because the sounds in Arabic do not exist in Gothic (for example, the emphatic consonants of Arabic).
*All sounds given will be in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Phonemes are written in between slashes //; however, if one is willing to have a go at Gothic dialects, then the corresponding sounds should be written in brackets []. However, I'm not focused on dialects, so I will use slashes //.
*Finally, in order to get things to work out the way I wanted it, I more or less had to adopt the mindset of someone writing the language in the Arabic alphabet. In order to do that, I had to be a bit creative - after all, if I was a Gothic man and I was writing my language down (say, a letter to my girlfriend asking her to marry me, for example), I would want to make sure that what I wrote would be something that I could understand. Let me tell you, though, it's not easy - especially with the Arabic alphabet, which is mainly a consonantal script where although there are symbols for only three vowels, they are not usually written down (an exception being the Qur'an). So, to adapt the language to the alphabet (and, for the most part, aim to go for a one-to-one correspondence between sound and letter as much as possible), I borrowed letters from Farsi, gave some letters different phonetic values, and borrowed a letter from Ottoman Turkish. The vowels were the most difficult part. Thus, although the way I handled the letters might drive some people like Leo up a wall (which I know he will for my treatment of one of the diphthongs in Gothic), to a Gothic person it would make sense.

Comprendez-vous? :D Good.

EDIT: This is the font test: https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=103178
 
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Without further ado . . . . .

The Arabic Alphabet, as applied to Gothic


Basic Letters

ا Alif: Various sounds, including /a:/
ء Hamza: Pause
ب Ba’ /b/
پ Pa’ /p/
ت Ta’ /t/
ث Tha’ /θ/
ج Gjim /ɟ:/
ح Ha’ /h/
خ Cha’ /x/
د Dal /d/
ذ Dhal /ð/
ر Ra’ /r/
ز Zain /z/
س Sin /s/
ش Siin /s/
ص Sad /s/
ض Dad /d/
ط Tah /t/
ظ Zah /z/
ع Ain /ʍ/
غ Ghain /ɣ/
ف Fa’ /ɸ/ or /f/
ڤ Bha’ /β/
ق Qaf /kw/ - /w/ should be in superscript
ک Kaf /k/
گ Gaf /g/
ك Ghaf /gw/ - /w/ should be in superscript
ڭ Ng /ŋ/
ل Lam /l/
م Mim /m/
ن Nun /n/
ه Hah /h/
و Waw /w/
ی Ya’ /j/

Extended letters

آ Alif Madda /e:/
Alif Wasla: No sound
ة Ta Marbuta /h/ or /t/ in Arabic loanwords, depending on context
Lam Alif /la:/

The Harakat of Gothic
Short vowels
َ Fatha /a/
ُ Damma /u/
ِ Kasra /i/

Long vowels
اَ Fatha Alif /a:/
یَ Fatha Ya’ /o:/
وُ Damma Waw /i:/
یِ Kasra Ya’ /u:/

Diphthongs
یَٰ Fatha Ya’ plus Dagger Alif /ai/
وَ Fatha Waw /au/
وِ Kasra Waw /iu/

Other
ْ Sukun (indicates a closed consonant; when placed on top of Alif Madda, Fatha Alif, or Fatha Ya’, indicates the vowels /ɛ/ (for the first two) and /ɔ/ (for the last one))
ّ Shadda (indicates a doubled consonant; when placed on top of Alif Madda, Fatha Alif, or Fatha Ya’, indicates the vowels /ɛ:/ (for the first two) and /ɔ:/ (for the last one))
ً, ٌ, ٍ Tanwin (doubled short vowels plus /n/, always word-final)
ٰ Dagger Alif /a:/ where Alif is normally not written

Numerals (Standard)
٠ Zero
١ One
٢ Two
٣ Three
٤ Four
٥ Five
٦ Six
٧ Seven
٨ Eight
٩ Nine

Here ends the alphabet.
 
Dang, when I first saw this thread, I thought it was about Peter Murphy from Bauhaus going all the way in his conversion to Islam like Cat Stevens did.

Though if you want to hear goth music through the prism of Turkish Sufism, pick up some of his latest albums.
 
I have to ask how likely is the survival of the Vandalic languages, if the Roman conquest fails?

Unfortunately, not very. Outside of English, all Germanic languages from that time failed to establish themselves (Frankish died out in Gaul, Ostrogothic and Langobardic in Italy, Visigothic in Spain, and Vandalic in North Africa). Latin was spoken widely in North Africa during the Vandal kingdom and if the Arab conquest had failed we might have a Romance language spoken in North Africa (A conlang I'm working on).

The main reason is the Germanic population was mostly men who settled with local women who would teach their children the local language. Also they used the Latin institutions that were already there, but just under "new managment".

Yeah, Islamic Vikings. There's an interesting image.:rolleyes:

There has to be a good Majus timeline somewhere. The Arabs realized it was the same people attacking Al-Andalus and Constantinople.:cool:

What about the Gothic Bible? Aren't enough parts of it preserved to serve as a Gothic Rosetta?

The Wulfila Bible and the Skeireins are the longest texts in Gothic. They give us most of the grammar but like Valdemar said, there isn't enough vocabulary for everyday speech. It could be done with a lot of loans and reconstructions, however, but someone upthread mentioned how language revitalization projects rarely work.
 
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