Studies in Gothic

It takes many years (usually six or seven) for such collections to see the light of day, but this book was especially slow in the making. The idea behind it seems to go back to approximately 2014. Two of the contributors are now dead, and the book is dedicated to their memory. The production of the Gothic translation in the fourth century may have taken less time. However, nothing is known about the work on the magnificent Codex Argenteus, whose most famous page graces the jacket of this collection. (Unfortunately, libraries remove jackets.) Since if we disregard the earliest Runic inscriptions, Gothic is the oldest recorded Germanic “dialect,” it has been at the center of philological research for centuries, and scholars keep finding ever new features in it worthy of discussion. As far as I know, the most recent similar collection of articles devoted to this subject appeared in 2010 (The Gothic Language: A Symposium [2010]).Wulfila may have been bilingual (Gothic-Greek) and may even have supervised the translation, but we do not know who translated the parts of the New Testament that have come down to us from a Greek original. Nor has the Greek text used by the clerics been identified. Yet any study of Gothic spelling, grammar, and usage presupposes a comparative approach: Gothic versus Greek. Naturally, this approach also accounts for much of the discussion in the present collection. Even the history of the famous manuscript reads like a detective story (“The Codex Argenteus: Some English Aspects and Enigmas,” by Charles Lock and †Magnús Hreinn Snædal, pp. 10–42). Not only Greek dominated the culture of the Goths. They were surrounded by Latin speakers. Therefore, the opening chapter in the book (“Linguistic Contacts and Exchanges between Ostrogoths and Romans” by Carla Falluomini, pp. 1–9), which describes the influence of Latin on Gothic, does not come as a surprise. Our sources in this area are few. Only one short paragraph (p. 9, top) deals with Italian borrowings from Gothic. Yet it should be remembered that no one has done more for uncovering the Germanic lexical layer in modern Italian dialects than Italian scholars, and that while Old Germanic philology is on the decline at American and European colleges, it retains its position in Italy.The pronunciation of Gothic will of necessity remain a matter of speculation. For instance, the value of the digraphs ai and au has been a subject of heated controversy for a long time. It is only indisputable that those digraphs designated short /e/ and /o/ before /r h hw/. Robert Howell's paper “What Do We Really Know about Gothic Breaking? On the Problem of Consonantally Conditioned Vowel Mutation in Germanic,” pp. 75–91, deals with just this phonetic environment. Breaking is one of the most confusing terms in Germanic historical linguistics. Gothic breaking refers to the monophthongal value of ai and au in the aforementioned environment. Howell's point is that the breaking in question occurred before /h/ (a pharyngeal sound) rather than /x/ (a fricative). This conclusion is probably noncontroversial. Less appealing is the idea that the change in question was conditioned by this pronunciation. Position, far from being able to produce change, only supplies an environment for it. Likewise, a wolf can be born in a forest or in a zoo, but for the cub to come into this world, it needs father wolf and mother wolf. A language historian has to explain why a certain change occurred in the given context and why it occurred when it did. The forest and the zoo remain, but we need the parents.Phonetics is also in the focus of the late Gary Miller's paper “Gothic -ei and -iþa: A Prosodic Difference.” His starting point was that Gothic opposed short and long vowels. This premise is probably also noncontroversial. Both Gothic suffixes of abstract nouns occur on heavy monosyllabic bases. Miller suggested that regardless of the semantic split, -iþa “latched onto a prosodic domain. The nature of this domain was that the citation form was dactylic or, in the case of weitwodiþa [testimony], had a dactylic cadence” (p. 105). Assuming that this conclusion goes far enough, we get at least some insight into the living speech of the Goths. Such questions once interested Karl Helm, but few people later. A single chapter in the book deals with etymology: Patrick V. Stiles's “Gothic jains, OE geon, Old High German jenēr, and Congeners” (pp. 106–24). The root is recognizable in Modern English yon(der). The old forms are similar but irritatingly different, and one wonders whether a protoform is reconstructable. Stiles suggests *jaina-, but as often happens in a study of origins, the details of the discussion are more exciting than the end result. The protoform looks credible, even if the reconstruction of the Indo-European protoform remains an unsolved problem. Nor did Stiles attempt to go beyond Germanic.Another study devoted to a single word is “Gothic fidurdōgs ‘Four Days Old’ and Some Traces of Denominal s-stems in Germanic” by Luzius Thöny (pp. 125–40). The word fidurdōgs has been in the limelight for so long because of the striking variation by ablaut (dag- ∼ dōg-), which is not confined to Gothic, and in connection with the history of the s-stem. Though “Gothic -dōgs is likely an i-stem adjective, . . . it is phonologically possible to derive it from a P[roto]G[ermani]c s-stem” (p. 139). It is once again the details that matter here. Limitation of space prevents me from touching on them, but they are discussed in the text with the attention they deserve. (This may be the right place to note that while in all the essays included in this book, everything naturally depends on the minutiae, my summaries can at best provide a hint of the content.)Brendan Wolfe (“The Greek Compounds in the Gothic Gospels,” pp. 43–74) examined compounds for which the translator found easy matches (words like witoda-laisareis “teacher of the law”), such as needed explanatory phrases, rather than individual words (for instance, kompōlis, which a fourth-century Goth may perhaps have translated by using the collective prefix ga- but preferred the phrase haims jah baurgs “cities and towns”), and finally, such as he rewrote in Gothic letters and thus produced borrowings. Scholars who study medieval translated texts, be it the Bible or Boethius, always wonder whether the medieval translator regularly used the same gloss for translating the same word of the original and discover that such a one-to-one correspondence does not exist. Wolfe arrived at the same conclusion. Also, Wayne Harbert (“On Gothic Translations of Greek Relative Pronouns,” pp. 200–30) made it clear that “the patterning of Gothic relative markers was systematic and rule-governed, independent of, or in contrast to, the Greek model, and therefore presumably driven by the choices imposed by Gothic grammar” (p. 228; the emphasis is mine). The more we learn about the extant translation, the more we admire the medieval clerics’ ingenuity and mastery of both Greek and Gothic.The reader remains more or less in the same area with Sheila Watts (“A Prefix-Particle Verb Cycle for Germanic?,” pp. 140–71). Watts looks at the processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization of verbal prefixes in all the Old Germanic languages. One of the difficulties she experiences is the inconsistent use of word boundaries in manuscripts: it is often unclear whether we deal with adverbs or prefixes. Syntax is even more pointedly in the focus of the contribution by Artūras Ratkus (“Linearization of Adnominal Possessives in Gothic,” pp. 172–99). He sets out to discover whether possessive pronouns precede or follow the nouns they modify. This is the meaning of the term linearization. Compare English your head and Gothic haubiþ þein “head thine.” To be sure, the Gothic Bible is a translation, but as noted, the Greek text has not been found, and Greek in this context is a cover term for at least two medieval varieties of that language. Also, we are again reminded of the fact that the influence of Latin on Gothic should not be ignored. It is the Gothic deviations from the Greek word order that are especially interesting. Not unexpectedly, Ratkus discovers that the translator(s) did not always follow the Greek model: “a prenominal modifier may have been stylistically charged, but it was not wrong. . . . it cannot be ruled out that Gothic had a mixed system if the older noun-modifier was undergoing a shift to the modifier-noun order” (p. 198).Since the editors grouped the chapters thematically (as much as it was possible), it does not come as a surprise that the concluding essays (by Ratkus and the two following ones) address related problems. Gisella Ferrarsi's subject is “Temporarily Anaphoric nu and þan as Discourse-Structuring Elements in Gothic” (pp. 231–347). Gothic nu and þan mean “now” and “then.” Those are tricky words: think of the funny English phrase now then!, used to attract attention to what is going to be said. As temporal locutions, nu and þan are obvious temporal adverbs, but “because of their discourse-structural function, they can mark a new intervening event or a new topic, depending on the discourse relation introduced by the clause containing nu or þan” (p. 247).The only chapter with a strong comparative focus is “Discourse Articulation in the Gothic Gospels, with Notes on the Treatment of the Same Phenomenon in Classical Armenian and Old Church Slavic Versions” by Jared S. Klein (pp. 248–93). By now, the question he raises will sound familiar. The Gothic text that has come down to us is a translation. Did the native, uninhibited Gothic display the same markers we observe in the extant version? We'll of course never know and of necessity, should be content with what we have. The discourse articulators Klein investigated are aþþan “but, however, still, yet,” iþ “but, however, if,” þan “when, then, etc.,” nu “so, consequently,” the enclitic -(u)h “and,” two adverbs (þan and þar), followed and in one case preceded by uh; auk “because; but, also,” and finally, jah “and, even.” The English contextual glosses are mine; I added them for convenience's sake. The whole point is that they mean what they are expected to mean in any given context! All of them, as it turned out, have one feature in common: “they are capable of linking larger discourse units of the sort that, in our curated Greek text of the Gospels, are typically associated with verse-boundaries” (pp. 292–93). The repertoire in Gothic is richer than one finds in Classical Armenian and Church Slavic.Several recent discoveries and publications, as the editors indicate, made another inroad into the domain of Gothic fully justified. Who said that Gothic is a dead language? The present collection testifies to the opposite.