goto

A historical term, and this page treats it as one. A goto is a member of the Gothic people: a Germanic group who appear in Roman sources from the third century, split into Visigoths and Ostrogoths - visigotoj and ostrogotoj - and shaped the end of the western Roman world. Alaric's Visigoths took Rome in 410. Theodoric's Ostrogoths ruled Italy from Ravenna for a generation after that. The word belongs to the same shelf of the vocabulary as barbaro and vandalo: you need it to read a history book, and it is the historical sense the dictionaries carry.

It is not the modern subculture. English goth picked up its black-clothes-and-eyeliner meaning in the early 1980s, and Esperanto did not follow it onto this root. The reference dictionaries file goto as the Germanic people and nothing else. What the subculture rides on instead is the adjective gotika, borrowed a second time and by a different route, so gotika muziko and gotikulo are how the modern thing gets said. If you mean somebody at a concert, do not call them a goto; you have called them a fifth- century Ostrogoth.

And the architecture is the same adjective, with a story attached.Gotika also means Gothic in the architectural sense - pointed arches, flying buttresses, gotika katedralo. That name was an insult. Italian Renaissance writers, Vasari most famously, called the medieval northern style Gothic because they thought it barbarous and blamed it on the Germanic peoples who had wrecked classical civilisation. The Goths had nothing whatever to do with it; they were seven hundred years dead when the first pointed arch went up. The slur stuck anyway, lost its sting, and is now the neutral term.

The language, which is why the word matters to linguists. The Goths give us the oldest substantial text in any Germanic language: Wulfila's translation of the Bible into Gothic in the fourth century, surviving mainly in the Codex Argenteus, the silver book, now in Uppsala. Everything we can say about early Germanic grammar leans on it. Gothic itself died out, though a dialect known as Crimean Gothic was still being written down in 1562, when the Habsburg ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq took a word list from two men in Constantinople.

Where it sits in the country system. Goto is a people-root, so it is what the landoj kaj popoloj article calls Category 1: the country would be built from the people, giving Gotio or the older Gotujo. In practice there is no such country to name, because the Goths never left a lasting state with their name on it. The one place that does carry it is the Swedish island of Gotland - Gotlando, land of the Gotar, a people whose relationship to the Goths is argued about but whose name is the same word. Note that Gotlando is built exactly like hejmlando fourteen ranks earlier: a plain compound with lando on the end, needing neither suffix nor argument.