On Gothic in the computer age

The Gothic language spoken some 1500 years ago in the area west and north of the Black Sea remains the darling of the older Germanic languages, as well as the preferred Germanic representative in Comparative Grammar. In the computer age researchers have readily accessible digitized Gothic texts, grammars, glossaries, bibliographies, as well as tagged corpora studies. In demonstrating the family resemblance of the inflectional morphology of the Gothic demonstrative pronoun, the strong adjective, and the third person pronoun, this paper makes use of the concept of inheritance networks, developed in computer linguistics, and of underspecification theory.