Student Activities

Dead (?) Language Tee-shirts

Walking around campus at UW, you might see things beyond the usual range of college town tee-shirts — shirts with texts in a range of early Germanic languages, including Old High German, Old Saxon, and Gothic.

The latest addition to the set is a Gothic shirt, from the Spring ’08 course, listed as German 758. The class scoured the Gothic corpus for texts and came up with what you see here. The front reads "ni draibei þana laisara, ‘don’t trouble the master’" — the class came to prefer the more colloquial ‘don’t bug the teacher’. Playing on that classroom reading, the back is an unrelated passage, "þata barn ni gadauþnoda, ak slepiþ ‘the child is not dead, but is sleeping.'" That text stands above an image of the columns that characterize manuscripts from Ravenna, where the codex was done.

The images are from the on-line facsimiles of the famous Codex Argenteus. Elliott Gougeon did the necessary hard work to get those images into shape for printing.

Fun with the older Germanic languages isn’t recent at UW: stories are still told of the days when Gothic classes included singing "atta unsar" (the ‘Our Father’) to the tune of “On Wisconsin”.