Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/877

Rh GOTHS airtliai. lllaif unsarana thana sinteiiian gif uns liiiiinia daga. J ah aﬂet uiis tliatci skulans sijaiina, swaswe jah wcis alletam thaim skulaiii unsaraim. Jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai, ak lausais uns af tlianinia ubilin. The Gothic language did not very long survive the times of Ulﬁla. From Moesia, where it had gained its highest literary culture, it disappeared together with the Goths, when they were driven from these parts by later migrations. In the western portions of Europe, that is, in Italy, France, and Spain, whither it had been carried by the emigrants, the Gothic language seems to have died out even sooner than the Gothic nationality, giving way to the overpowering inﬂuence of Latin, and leaving behind it only a few indis- tinct relics in some proper names and other words that had been received into that victorious language. .It was only in a remote spot of the Crimea that it continued to exist until the 16th century, when the last remains of a_ P’ 803 ending in -t (as in Gothic and Old Norse zcast, gaft, thou wert, gavest) by the corresponding form of the subjunctive (Old English wa7rc, god (3, Old Saxon and Old High German wtiri, gdbi). Vestern 'I‘eiitoiiie has also lost the faculty of deriving passive or intransitive verbs from active verbs or adjectives by adding the syllable -mz- after the root—syllable, as in Gothic fullnma, Old Norse fullna, to be ﬁlled, as compared with Gothic fulls, Old Norse fullr, full; or Gothic ful/jtm, Old N orse f_z/Ila, to fill. Only a very few instances of this formation are left in Western Teutonic, such as Old English wccc-nan, to awaken [intrans.], or lcorm'an, German lcrnc-n, to learn (cf. Old English wccccm, German wcclccn, to awaken [trans.], and German lchrcn, to teach). As to the vocabulary, we may mention the loss of the verb ddn, to do, in Gothic and Scandi- navian. The inost conspicuous peculiarity in the syntax is the frequent use of the dative (or perhaps originally the instrumental case) instead of the aeeusativc in Eastern Teutonic. Among the Teutonic languages Gothic holds by far the foremost rank as regards the regularity of its sound-system and itsinflexicns. I The vowel system is remarkable for the absence of the short a and, . . I Gothic people were detected, and a few specimens of their 1 language were gathered by Augerius de Busbeek, a Dutch traveller, who visited the eastern parts of Europe in the years 1554-1564.‘ It is well known that the literary remains of Gothic are (with the exception, perhaps, of a few Runic inscriptions belonging to the Scandinavian languages) by several centuries the oldest specimens of Teutonic speech, and therefore have a particular value for the student of the history of that family of languages. Notwithstand- ing this fact, it would be altogether wrong to regard Gothic as the common source of the more modern stages of these idioms. Although very archaic in many of its forms and sounds, it is in those still far removed from the original features of the common language, as that was spoken before any separation of Teutonic tribes had taken place. Most nearly related to it seem to have been the Scaii(liiiavian languages, which are now generally assumed to have formed, together with Gothic, the so-called eastern braneli'3 of the Teutonic family, while English, Frisian, and Low and High German belonged to a western division. The latter is cliieﬂ y marked by the introduction of a considerable number of forms and sounds of a less archaic stamp, while the eastern idioms are found to have adhered more closely to the original forms. Thus, almost the only distinct inno- vation in the sound-system of the eastern branch is the iiisertion of a g sound into the groups iuw, auw, aw in accented syllables, as in Gothic Iriggzcs, Old Norse tryggr, compared with Old High Ger- man aiid Old Saxon trhuei, Old English trcowc, trywc, “ true ”; or Old Norse hﬁggra, to liew, Old High German and Old Saxon hauwan, Old English hcawan. lVestern Teutonic, on the other hand, is at once discernible by its doubling all single consonants ending a short root-syllable before 3/ (w, 7', Z); thus Old English thccccm, Old Saxon tliclckirzn, Old High German dcckcn, to cover (literally “to thatch ”), but Gothic thaltjan, Old Noise tlzcltja; or Old English scllan,-Old Saxon scllian, Old High German scllcn, to sell, but Gothic saljan, Old Norse sclja. As to the inﬂexional system, the aeeusativc plural of nouns has in lVes-tern Teutonic been replaced by the nominative form, as in Old English dagas, 0 sounds, except in a few places where Z and 6 (spelt (ti and au) oeeurnndcr certain consonaiital inﬂuences. Umlaut, or assimilation of root-vowels to a following a-, 'i-, or u- sound, is not discernible in Gothic. Thus we ﬁnd only ﬁve short vowels, a, (ai), i, (au), '11 ; ﬁve long vowels (2, E, i (spelt e2"), 6, 21; and three diplitliongs ai, There may have been other distinctions of vowel- qualities besides those expressed in spelling, but we have no means of deﬁnitely settling this question ; so much, however, can be said, that the long vowels, and especially 6 and 6, probably had the close sounds, since these are often interchanged with cal and u in our inanuscripts. The spelling of the consoiiaiital system is also very simple. Besides y, w, 7', l and three nasal sounds (the guttural ' nasal being cxpresssed by g after the Greek fashion), we ﬁnd three u E Old Saxon dwgés, (_)ld High German tagd, days; Gothic still has. tlagés for the noininative, and dagmzs for the aeeusativc, the Old Iorse forms being (lugar and (laga respectively. The same change is found in the adjectives, as Old English and Old Saxon blimlc, ll Old High German blinte, blind (cocci), corresponding to both Gothic L blindai and blhuians, Old Norse blind'z'r and blinda. On the other hand, the fomiation of the plural of certain neutral siibstaiitives by adding an 7', as in Old English lombru, lambs, Old High German Icmbir (still extant in the English plural child7'c7L) is entirely lost in Eastern Teutonic (Gothic lamba, Old Norse liimb). Another instance of change is to be seen in the loss of the dative case of the reflective pronoun (Gothic sis, Old Norse sér) in 'Westem Teutonic, the corre- sponding forins of the personal pronoun of the 3d person being used instead (Old English him, hire, &c.) Vestern Teutonic has also introduced the use of the genitive fomis of the same personal pronoun instead of the possessive pronoun (Gothic sci-n.s', Old Norse sinn) when the possessor is denoted by a feminine or a plural (Old English has gone even farther by dropping the possessive pro- no_un altodether). In the verb, Vest'ern Teutonic has replaced the original fiirm of the 2d person singular of the past indicative 1 See his report and word-lists, reprinted by Massmann, in Zcit schriﬂ fiir Ileutsches Alterthu-m, i. p. 345 seq. The words contained in these lists are not all intelligible, and some of them are clearly of Slavonic or Iranian origin, but others are decidedly Gothic as regards their form, thus schl-z'pe7z, to sleep; er-iten, to weep; fgder, four; the correct Gothic forms being .5-Ic'pa'n, grétrm, _/i(lz'67'. _2 H. Ziiiiiner, "Ostgermanen iind -'estgermanen,” in Zcitsc/zrift far Deutsches Alterthum, xix. p. 393 sq. voiceless stops, 1), t, Ir (q being only a combination of kw); three voiced stops, b, cl, g; four voiceless spirants, f, 3, th, h; and only one distinct sign for a voiced spiraiit, z. This system of spelling, however, is obviously insufficient to express all the sounds of the language,—an insufficiency partly due to the fact that the transcrip- tion ofthe Gothic speech-souiids was eliieﬂ y an imitation of the Greek graphic system, which, at least in Ulﬁla's tiine., had become rather imperfect, inasmuch as diﬂl-rent sounds developed out of one sound of an earlier period were still often expressed by the same sign (just as in the English orthography of the present day). It is highly probable, for instance, that the signs of b, d, g of the Gothic alphabet not only expressed the sounds of voiced stop consonants (mcditc), but also represented the sounds of voiced spirants, such as English '12 and soft th, or North German g after a vowel (these values being the only ones left to the Modern Greek signs 3, 7, 6). Ilciice the regular change of b, d ﬁnal after a vowel into f, th, as in gaf, I gave, from gibmr, to give; or bath, 1 bade, from lu'dja7z, to bid.3 Great regularity prevails also in the inﬂexional system. In the substantival and adjectival declensions the instrumental case has become extinct by an early confusion with the dative (the case conmionl_v called dative being, in fact, a mixture of forms of the original dative and the instrumental and local cases), while in the lVestern branch of Teutonic it was still in frequent use. At the same time, Gothic is the only Teutonic idiom that has still pre- served, iii a few cases, the vocative in a form distinct from that of the nominative (ﬁsks, ﬁsh, for instance, has ﬁsk in the voc.). The adjcctival dccleiision is remarkable for the retention of special forms of the 'i- and u- stems, which in all other Teutonic languages have been transferred to the inﬂexion of the ja- stems. In the pro- nominal inﬂexion the instrumental case has been kept distinct in a few instances, such as thé, hvé (the latter form being the same as Eng- lisli why). There are also some relics of the dual number left in the 1st and 2d personal pronouns. As for the verb, Gothic is quite unique in retaining the old formation of the passive voice by means of simple derivation (as in baimda, baimnda, he is, they are borne, Greek ¢e’pe-raa, ¢e’pov-raa), the dual nnniber of the 1st and 2d persons throughout the whole active voice (bairés, bairats, we, you two bear, in the indicative, or baimz'va., bai7'aits in the subjunctive, or bér-u, be'r2cts, we, you two bore [iiid.], and lrércira, bcrc-its [subj.] along with the plural forms bairmn, bairith, &c.), and the 3d person of the imperative (as ba-irada-u, bairaazdau, he, they shall bear, Greek ¢aep£"rw, <pep6wrwy). The different verbal classes are of course the same as in the other cognate idioms; but they are kept more completely distinct in Gothic, for it is only there that the reduplicatioii has been preserved intact in the past of the rediipli- cative verbs, Gothic haihald, I held, for instance, eoircsponding to such shortened forms as Old Norse halt, Old English hcold, Old Saxon held, and Old High Gerniau hélt, hcalt, hiclt. Gothic again is the only language that seems to give us a clue to the explanation of the formation of the past in weak verbs. 'l‘herc we ﬁnd such 3 See W. Weingaertner, Die Jussprachc dcs (-‘ollzisclzcn (Leipsic, 1658); F. Dietrich, Ucber die Aussprache des G'nl}z1'srlmi (Marbnrg, 1862) ; H. Paul, " Ziir Lautverschiebung,” in ]}e1't7'('i.ge zur G’:-sclu'chte der Deutschen Sprache mid Literatm-, i. 147 :9. (Halle, 1874).
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