Rus va ingliz tillari kafedrasi roman-german filologiyasiga kirish

THE GOTHIC WRITTEN LANGUAGE AND MONUMENTS 
These earliest monuments of the Old Germanc written language, which give us 
the possibility of speaking on the structure and the vocabulary of the languages, were 
written in Gothic. The written records of other Old Germanc languages appeared 
much later, several centuries after. The monuments of the Gothic language reflect the 
stage in its development when it is still possible to reveal to a certain extent the main 
peculiarities which characterize Old Germanc languages as a whole. Later on, when 

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written monuments of other Old Germanc languages appeared, these peculiarities had 
become obliterated or changed considerably, so that only a comparison with Gothic 
makes it possible to reconstruct the earliest stage in their development or at Least to 
understand the origin of the phenomenon under review. The early appearance of 
monuments in Gothic is due to the activities of Ulfilas (in Gothic Wulfila), a Gothic 
bishop and scholar (311-383). For more than 40 years he labored, first making a 
Gothic alphabet so that he could translate the Bible and then teaching his people the 
new faith. This Bible translated by Ulfilas is centuries older than the earliest writing 
which we have in any other Old Germanc languages, so its historical value is very 
great. The manuscripts containing the fragments of the biblical translation which 
have come down to us, are not contemporary with Ulfilas, they were written in the 
West Gothic dialect in Italy about the year 500. The monuments are the following: 
I.Codex Argenteus, in the University library of Uppsala (Sweden). This codex 
contained originally on 330- Leaves the four Gospels in the order Matthew, 
John, Luke and Mark. At present only 187 Leaves are still preserved. The 
manuscript was written on a purple parchment, the letters were silver and 
golden. It was first published in 1665.