East Germanic

The East Germanic subgroup was formed by the tribes who returned from Scandinavia at the beginning of our era. The most numerous and powerful of them were the Goths. They were among the first Teutons to leave the coast of the Baltic Sea and start on their great migrations. Around 200 A. D. they moved south-east and some time later reached the lower basin of the Danube, where they made attacks on the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium. Their western branch, the Visigote, invaded Roman territory, participated in the assaults on Rome under Alaric and moved on to southern Gaul, to found one of the first barbarian kingdoms of Medieval Europe, the Toulouse kingdom. The kingdom lasted until the 8th c. though linguistically the western Goths were soon absorbed by the native population, the Romanised Celts (the Celts of Modern France and Spain had been subjected to strong Roman influence – “Romanised”: they spoke local varieties of Latin which gave rise to modern Romance languages. The eastern Goths, Ostrogot e consolidated into a powerful tribal alliance in the lower basin of the Dniester, were subjugated by the Huns under Atilla, traversed the Balkans and set up a kingdom in Northern Italy, with Ravenna as its capital. The short-lived flourishing of Ostrogothic culture in the 5th − 6th c. under Theodoric came to an end with the fall of the kingdom.

The Gothic language, now dead, has been preserved in written records of the 4th − 6th c. The Goths were the first of the Teutons to become Christian. In the 4th c. Ulfilas, a West Gothic bishop, made a translation of the Gospels from Greek into Gothic using a modified form of the Greek alphabet. Parts of Ulfilas' Gospels − a manuscript of about two hundred pages, probably made in the 5th or 6th c. − have been preserved and are kept now in Uppsala, Sweden. It is written on red parchment with silver and golden letters and is known as the SILVER CODEX (CODEX ARGENTEUS). Ulfilas' Gospels were first published in the 17th c. and have been thoroughly studied by 19th and 20th c. philologists. The SILVER CODEX is one of the earliest texts in the languages of the Germanic group; it represents a form of language very close to PG and therefore throws light on the pre-written stages of his­tory of all the languages of the Germanic group, including English. The other East Germanic languages, all of which are now dead, have left no written traces. Some of their tribal names have survived in place-names, which reveal the directions of their migrations: Bornholm and Burgundy go back to the East Germanic tribe of Burgundians; Andalusia is derived from the tribal name Vandals; Lombardy got its name from the Langobards, who made part of the population of the Ostrogothic kingdom in North Italy.

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