THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 93 



We must now seek to determine the time of this first general 

 shifting. Our earliest sources of knowledge of the forms of the Ger- 

 manic languages are the Germanic words quoted by Latin writers, as 

 sapo by Pliny, framea and glaesum by Tacitus. If the Goths and 

 Getae are identical, the plant-names from Dacia given by a Greek 

 writer, Dioscorides, deserve consideration.''' Dating from about the 

 same time are some words borrowed from the Scandinavians by the 

 Finns and Lapps, as Finnic niwtta ' net ' (Old Norse not), raippa 

 ' rope ' (O. N. reip), and Lappic satpo ' soap ' (Swedish sapa), divres, 

 ' dear ' (O. Sw. dyr) : these words are quite numerous. Next in 

 order of time we have a number of inscriptions in Runic characters 

 from about 250 A. D., all of which are short ; one from Wallachia, 

 coming from heathen times, reads Gutoniowi hailag ' dedicated to 

 the temple of the Goths.' Far more satisfactory as an evidence of 

 the character of the language in early times is the translation of the 

 Bible into Gothic made by Wulfila (311-381 A. D.) ; the most im- 

 portant of the manuscripts is of the sixth century, but the forms are 

 certainly much earlier, for it is doubtful, whether the language long 

 survived the maker of the translation. Judging by these data we 

 may safely conclude that the shifting began before the time of 

 Christ ; in the Gothic we find it practically complete. 



The history of the alphabet also throws some light on the matter. 

 Canon Taylor in his " Greeks and Goths " has urged strong reasons 

 for believing that the Gothic runes were derived from the Ionian 

 alphabet of about 500 B. C. Now the character, which in Greek 

 represents g, in Gothic inscriptions denotes k, and we have a similar 

 shifting of value from ch to g ; this would seem to indicate the re- 

 tention of old spellings after the sounds had changed. In the den- 

 tals the change of value is from M, d to d, th respectively, while the 

 sign for / remains unchanged. Whatever conclusion we draw from 

 these facts concerning the nature of the first sound shifting, we can 

 see that the tendency to change did not cease for some time after 

 the introduction of the alphabet among the Goths. Assuming that 

 the words from which come our hemp and path were borrowed after 

 the German tribes came into contact with Roman civilization, we 

 find the tendency existing still later : but these words were in the 

 language before Kaiser, which Kluge believes to be the first borrow- 



(i) 1 do not know anything of these names further than that they are said to be of Germanic 

 form. 



