Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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The Little Prince speaks 484 languages –
and now also Gothic

Gothic is essentially the language of the Bible translation attributed to the West Gothic bishop Wulfila (311-383). We have large parts of the New Testament: the four Gospels and the letters of Paul. It is indeed a relatively small corpus but long enough to give us a fairly good idea of the grammatical structure and basic vocabulary of the language. Our knowledge of its grammar is consequently fairly complete. The vocabulary is, of course, limited to that of the New Testament, which enables us, however, to treat of a large variety of non-technical subjects. In translating Saint-Exupéry’s 20th century work century into the Gothic language one obviously finds large gaps between Wulfila’s Biblical vocabulary and words describing modern concepts, objects and ideas. Consequently, we had to resort to a variety of strategies and methods to create new words. … We invite the interested reader to discover how we went about – with much pleasure – inventing neologisms, which are scientifically sound and plausible for Wulfila’s language.