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It is very hard to search for "Gothic" in Google, because it finds modern gothic stuff which is not what I'm looking for. I found the word "๐Œฐ๐Œป๐Œฐ๐‚๐Œด๐Œน๐Œบ๐ƒ" (but I can't find a definition haha), and searching for that reveals a Gothic Wikipedia! But I can't Google-translate-stumble-my-way-around the site, because Google doesn't translate Gothic. So it takes orders of magnitude longer to figure out each word and try and debug what I am looking at.

The only other thing I can find is the Gothic Lord's Prayer, also on the wiki.

I would like to find something original to the Gothic people. I know we don't have much from their culture, but do we have anything? Like even a short poem? Maybe a story? Maybe a carving?

The reason for asking is because I am looking for primary sources to learn how to speak Gothic and learn the Gothic grammar. I got the grammar book but don't know yet about if there exists resources on the web available for original texts. Last time I asked a similar question on History stackexchange and they said it would be better on Linguistics, because you guys know more about the language side of history.

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  • ๐Œฐ๐Œป๐Œฐ๐‚๐Œด๐Œน๐Œบ๐ƒ is "Alareiks", which as far as I can tell isn't actually attested in written Gothicโ€”but Latin sources record the name of a Visigothic king as "Alaricus", so the Gothic form can be back-derived from that. – Draconis Mar 16 '20 at 3:42
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The main corpus for Gothic is Wulfila's sixth-century translation of the Bible, which is attested across a number of different codices (the silver-lettered Codex Argenteus being the most famous one). All the surviving parts have been digitized and put online by the Wulfila project.

That said, though, it'll be much easier to learn with a good grammar and/or textbook than just by looking at the Bible. I've heard good things about Lambdin's Introduction to the Gothic Language, though I haven't read it myself.

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  • So there's no poem's then in Gothic? – Lance Pollard Mar 16 '20 at 4:25
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    @LancePollard Not as far as I'm aware. There are a few other works in Gothic from a few centuries after Wulfila, but they're shorter and mostly fragmentary. I don't think there's any attested poetry. – Draconis Mar 16 '20 at 4:46

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