Gothic prestige and borrowing

Piotr wrote:
<<Yes, there are just a handful of loans from Iranian and Slavic (of course
there were numerous loans _from_ Gothic into Slavic, the latter being a
low-prestige language at the time).>>

Just as a sidebar, I have to mention something about the "low-prestige
language" explanation for these loans, which I understand to be the
traditional one.

This all goes completely against my experience as an English-speaker and
whatever I know about the history of that language, particularly with regard
to law, technology and popular culture.

English has for a long time inhaled new elements from other languages without
blinking an eye. Whether it had prestige or not at any particular point,
English has shown that it will pick up and use practically anything that
looks half-way useful. And American English certainly hasn't borrowed as
wildly as it has because of low prestige.

Whatever a language's value as a marker of status or ethnic identity, it
would still be pretty useless without its primary value as a tool of
communication and information transmittal. That was the power of early Greek
and English in my mind, the ability to adapt to a changing world and input
new information.

From that perspective, it simply looks like there was something wrong with
Gothic and that Slavic was coming on strong. (And with hindsight that Gothic
would end up a dead language and Slavic would spread like it did.)

And, of course, Ulfila's Goths are not described as being in a particularly
prestigious position by Jordanes (I think he calls them poor cow herders) or
within the roman concept of civitas. Again I wonder if we are not catching
the Gothic lexicon when it is attested in some kind of restoration phase,
when it is grasping to maintain its identity in a formal exposition like the
New Testament. Perhaps Ulfila was trying to demonstrate that the language
was unique and distinctively foreign to the powers in Constantinople and Rome
by minimizing the use of loans, in order to justify using the vernacular.
Perhaps he was making it consciously archaic in order to give the authority
of time and tradition to the new religion. Gothic just could not have been
that immune to the world around it and still remain functional. (Or perhaps
that was its demise.)

Regards,
Steve Long