Gothic language: Encyclopedia II - Gothic language - Morphology

Gothic language - Morphology

Gothic language - Nouns

Gothic preserves many archaic Indo-European features that are not always present in modern Germanic languages, in particular the rich Indo-European declension system. Gothic had nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases, as well as vestiges of a vocative case that was sometimes identical to the nominative and sometimes to the accusative. The three genders of Indo-European were all present, including the neuter gender of modern German and Icelandic and to some extent modern Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, in opposition to the "common gender" (genus commune) which applies to both masculine and feminine nouns. Nouns and adjectives were inflected according to one of two grammatical numbers: the singular and the plural.

One of the most striking characteristics of the East Germanic languages is the division of nouns between those with weak declensions (generally those where the root word ends in an n) and those with strong declensions (those whose roots end in a vowel or an inflexional suffix indicative of a pronoun). This separation is particularly important in Gothic. While a noun can only belong to one class of declensions, depending on the end of the root word, some adjectives can be either strongly or weakly declined, depending on their meaning. An adjective employed with a particular meaning and accompanied by a deictic article, like the demonstrative pronouns sa, þata, or so which act as definite articles, took a weak declension, while adjectives used with indefinite articles had a strong declension.

This process is still sometimes found in German, where adjectives are declined:

• weak declension: der gute Wein ("the good wine") ;
• strong declension: guter Wein ("good wine"), ein guter Wein ("a good wine")

Descriptive adjectives in Gothic (as well as superlatives ending in -ist and -ost) and the past participle may take either declension. Some pronouns only take the weak declension; for example: sama (English "same"), adjectives like unƕeila ("constantly", from the root ƕeila, "time"; compare to the English "while"), comparative adjectives, and present participles. Others, such as áins ("some"), take only the strong declension.

The table below displays the declension of the Gothic adjective blind (English: "blind") with a weak noun (guma - "man") and a strong one (dags - "day"):

This table is, of course, not exhaustive. (There are secondary inflexions, particularly for the strong neuter singular and irregular nouns among other contexts, which are not described here.) An exhaustive table of only the types of endings Gothic took is presented below.

• strong declension :
  • roots ending in -a, -ja, -wa (masculine and neuter): equivalent to the Greek and Latin second declension in ‑us / ‑i and ‑ος / ‑ου;
  • roots ending in -o, -jo and -wo (feminine): equivalent to the Greek and Latin first declension in ‑a / ‑æ and ‑α / ‑ας (‑η / ‑ης);
  • roots ending in -i (masculine et feminine): equivalent to the Greek and Latin third declension in ‑is (acc. ‑im) and ‑ις / ‑εως;
  • roots ending in -u (all three genders) : equivalent to the Latin fourth declension in ‑us / ‑us and the Greek third declension in ‑υς / ‑εως;
• weak declension (all roots ending in -n), equivalent to the Greek and Latin third declension in ‑o / ‑onis and ‑ων / ‑ονος or ‑ην / ‑ενος:
  • roots ending in -an, -jan, -wan (masculine);
  • roots ending in -on et -ein (feminine);
  • roots ending in -n (neuter): equivalent to the Greek and Latin third declension in ‑men / ‑minis and ‑μα / ‑ματος;
• minor declensions : roots ending in -r, en -nd and vestigial endings in other consonants, equivalent to other third declensions in Greek and Latin.

Gothic adjectives follow noun declensions closely - they take same types of inflexion.

Gothic language - Pronouns

Gothic inherited the full set of Indo-European pronouns: personal pronouns (including reflexive pronouns for each of the three grammatical persons), possessive pronouns, both simple and compound demonstratives, relative pronouns, interrogatives and indefinite pronouns. Each follows a particular pattern of inflexion (partially mirroring the noun declension), much like other Indo-European languages. One particularly noteworthy characteristic is the preservation of the dual number, refering to two people or things while the plural was only used for quantities greater than two. Thus, "the two of us" and "we" for numbers greater than two were expressed as wit and weis respectively. While proto-Indo-European used the dual for all grammatical categories that took a number (as did classical Greek and Sanskrit), Gothic is unusual among Indo-European languages in only preserving it for pronouns.

The simple demonstrative pronoun sa (neuter: þata, feminine: so, from the Indo-European root *so, *seh₂, *tod; cognate to the Greek article ὁ, τό, ἡ and the Latin istud) can be used as an article, allowing constructions of the type definite article + weak adjective + noun.

The interrogative pronouns are also noteworthy for all beginning in ƕ-, which derives from the proto-Indo-European consonant *k^w that was present at the beginning of all interrogratives in proto-Indo-European. This is cognate to the wh- at the beginning of many English interrogatives which, like in Gothic, are pronounced with [ʍ] in some dialects. This same etymology is present in the interrogratives of many other Indo-European languages" w- [v] in German, v- in Swedish, the Latin qu- (which persists in modern Romance languages), the Greek τ or π (a derivation of *k^w that is unique to Greek), and the Sanskrit k- as well as many others.

Gothic language - Verbs

The bulk of Gothic verbs follow the type of Indo-European conjugation called "thematic" because they insert a vowel derived from the reconstructed proto-Indo-European phonemes *e or *o between roots and inflexional suffixes. This pattern is also present in Greek and Latin:

• Latin - leg-i-mus ("we read"): root leg- + thematic vowel -i- (from *e) + suffix -mus.
• Greek - λυ-ό-μεν ("we untie"): root λυ- + thematic vowel -ο- + suffix -μεν.
• Gothic - nim-a-m ("we take"): root nim- (German nehmen) + thematic vowel -a- (from *o) + suffix -m.

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.

Gothic verbs are, like nouns and adjectives, divided into strong verbs and weak verbs. Weak verbs are characterised by preterites formed by appending the suffixes -da or -ta, parallel to past participles formed with -þ / -t. Strong verbs form preterites by alternating vowels in their root forms or by doubling the first consonant in the root, but without adding a suffix in either case. This parallels the Greek and Sanskit perfect tenses. This dichotomy is still present in modern Germanic languages:

• weak verbs ("to have") :
  • Gothic: haban, preterite habáida, past participle habáiþs ;
  • English: (to) have, preterite had, past participle had ;
  • German: haben, preterite hatte, past participle (ge)habt ;
  • Icelandic: hafa, preterite hafði, past participle haft ;

• strong verbs ("to give") :
  • Gothic: infinitive giban, preterite gaf ;
  • English: infinitive (to) give, preterite gave ;
  • German: infinitive geben, preterite gab ;
  • Icelandic: infinitive gefa, preterite gaf.

Verbal inflexions in Gothic have two grammatical voices: the active and the medial; three numbers: singular, dual (except in the third person), and plural; two tenses: present and preterite (derived from a former perfect tense); three grammatical moods: indicative, subjunctive (from an old optative form) and imperative; as well as three kinds of nominal forms: a present infinitive, a present participle, and a past passive. Not all tenses and persons are represented in all moods and voices - some conjugations use auxiliary forms.

Finally, there are forms called "preterite-present" - old Indo-European perfect tenses that were reinterpreted as present tense. The Gothic word wáit, from the proto-Indo-European *woid-h₂e ("to see" in the perfect tense), corresponds exactly to its Sanskrit cognate véda and in Greek to Ϝοἶδα. Both etymologically should mean "I saw" (in the perfective sense) but mean "I see" (in the preterite-present meaning). Latin follows the same rule with nōuī ("I knew" and "I know"). The preterite-present verbs include áihan ("to possess") and kunnan ("to know") among others.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Morphology", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki