Ebook: Dictionary of the Biblical Gothic Language

In spite of the tremendous amounts of scholarly labor which have been expended on the study of Gothic, the semantic understanding of its vocabulary has been confined to those relatively few English-speakers who have known Greek or German, or both. And even to such scholars as these, the meanings of many words have been unknown or only poorly known. In this "Dictionary", the first complete Gothic-English dictionary in eight decades (since G. H. Balg's "Comparative Glossary of the Gothic Language" in 1889), and the first full Gothic-modern language dictionary in any language whatsoever in three decades (since Sigmund Feist's "Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der gotischen Sprache" in 1939), I have tried to incorporate, in the glosses given for each Gothic word, most of the most recent research in Gothic semantics and the relevant New Testament Greek semantics. With this lexicographical tool, the exploration of historical and comparative Germanic linguistics is considerably facilitated for American and other English-speaking students. It is also a modern reference source on the Gothic language for the person who may simply be interested in the etymologies of the English language he speaks. New Testament scholars will find that the Gothic Bible, in spite of its word-for-word approximation to the Greek texts, makes fine semantic distinctions where the Greek does not make them.
The primary goal of this dictionary is to give the meaning of each known Gothic word as it appears in the Gothic context, and not necessarily as a translation of a Greek word or words (which it may not be) or as a cognate to other Germanic words. ("Introduction")