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Gothic: Western Europe
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Gothic architecture is most familiar as the architecture of many of the great cathedrals, abbeys and parish churches of Europe. It is ... the architecture of many castles, palaces, town halls, guild halls, universities, and to a less prominent extent, private dwellings.
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Gothic architecture grew from the Romanesque, the style of Christian Europe between 800 and 1200. Vestiges of ancient Rome, particularly the round arch, were crossed with Byzantine showiness and Teutonic naturalistic and geometric ornament.
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The defining characteristic of Gothic architecture is the pointed or ogival arch. Arches of this type were used in Islamic architecture before they were used structurally in European architecture, and are thought to have to been the inspiration for their use in France, as at Autun Cathedral, which is otherwise stylistically Romanesque.[7]
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Accentuation in Gothic can be reconstructed through phonetic comparison, Grimm's law and Verner's law. Gothic used a stress accent rather than the pitch accent of proto-Indo-European. It is indicated by the fact that long vowels
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A still greater argument against the acceptance of this structural definition lies in the fact that while, as Professor Moore declares, "the Gothic monument, thought wonderful as a structural organism, is even more wonderful as a work of art" (op. cit., V, 190), this great artistic element, which for more than three centuries was predominant throughout the greater part of Western Europe, existed quite independently of the supreme structural system, and varies only in minor details of racial bias and of presentation, whether it is found in France or Normandy, Spain or Italy, Germany, Flanders, or Great Britain -- this, which is in itself the manifestation of the underlying impulses and the actual accomplishments of the era it connotes, is treated as an accessory to a structural evolution, and is left without a name except the perfunctory title of "Pointed", which is even less descriptive than the word Gothic itself.
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The other conjugation, called "athematic", where suffixes are added directly to roots, exists only in unproductive vestigial forms in Gothic, just as it does in Greek and Latin. The most important such instance is the verb "to be", which is athematic in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and many other Indo-European languages.
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