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Statistical Patterns in Gothic Phonology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Martin Joos
Martin Joos*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Jellinek has presented lists of the Gothic consonant-clusters (excluding accidental clusters resulting from compounding, such as tg), with notations of which clusters are found in only one word, but with no other remarks on frequency of occurrence. Dewey has gone a step further with English consonant-clusters: from his tables we learn how many times each cluster was found in his 100,000 words of sample texts. A different kind of frequency is reported in the Twaddell study of one- and two-syllable German words: having analysed the uncompounded words in a lexicon, he reports the number of different forms in which each cluster was found. The Jellinek report gives us no statistical picture in the sense intended here; the Dewey count gives us a statistical picture of TEXT frequencies; the Twaddell count, of LIST frequencies.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 18 , Issue 1-Part1: April-June , March 1942 , pp. 33 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © 1942 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 Max Hermann Jellinek, Geschichte der gotischen Sprache; Berlin, 1926.

2 Godfrey Dewey, Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds; Harvard University Press, 1923.

3 Cf. W. F. Twaddell, Combinations of Consonants in Stressed Syllables in German, Acta Linguistica 1.189–99 (1939), 2.31–50 (1940–1).

4 Fully reported in Statistical Studies in Gothic Phonology, unpublished Wisconsin dissertation. The original list of Gothic forms and their frequencies was kindly lent by its compiler, G. K. Zipf of Harvard University, who is, however, not to be held responsible for details of the data presented here, because the list was somewhat modified for this study as well as being checked and corrected.

4a On Chart II, each unlabeled point stands for a cluster of two or more consonants. A number within a circle stands for that many coincident points.

5 More properly, last stem vowels. From each form we take the last vowel that is not part of an ending.

6 Data extracted from the Wortindex zu Goethes Faust, compiled by A. R. Hohlfeld, Martin Joos, and W. F. Twaddell; Madison, 1940. The text of Faust is roughly one-third longer than that of the extant Gothic texts, which ought not to make any appreciable difference in the appearance of the chart, except that all points are slightly shifted to the right.