Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VIII.djvu/132

 124 GOTHIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE It has a good harbor, with 17 ft. of water, enclosed by two long ridges of rock about 1 J m. apart. There is anchorage for vessels of large size, but only the smaller craft can come up to the shore. The city is intersected by navigable canals, and as it occupies marshy ground, the houses of the lower town are generally built on piles. The upper town stands on adjacent rocky heights. The houses are mostly of stone or stuccoed brick, with terraced roofs. The principal public edifices are the cathedral, the Swedish church, the new exchange, the arsenal, the town hall, the theatre, and the East India house. The manufactures comprise cottons, woollens, sail cloth, tobacco, snuff, glass, paper, leather, refined sugar, and porter. Most of the merchants are Scotch and English. In 1872 the entries at the port were 2,161 vessels, of 598,487 tons; the clearances 1,800 vessels, of 648,545 tons. The city was founded by Gus- Gothenburg. tavns Adolphus in 1618, and was once well fortified. It has had frequent fires. GOTHIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The Gothic language became extinct with that Ger- manic race by whom it was spoken. The exist- ing Gothic manuscripts are written in charac- ters related in form and order to the Greek alphabet, and, it is said, invented by Bishop Ulfilas. The order of the alphabet has been ascertained from the numerical values attached to the letters. It is not customary in modern books to make use of Ulfilas's characters. The original form, order, and numerical value of the Gothic alphabet, and the way in which it is usually transcribed, are as follows : ro**. Kim. TAUT*. TBANBC. FORM. ITCH. VALUE. TBANSC. li r & e u 7, h I' i i K A M II 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 80 40 60 b g d e kv(q) z h th(t>) i k 1 in 60 70 80 90 100 200 800 400 600 600 700 800 t v(w) f z(ch) hv 6 900 The transcription of several letters is not uni- form. Some write, instead of kv, qu ; for 0, the German w ; and instead of the aspirated hv, a simple v or w. Diacritical points are put over i at the beginning of a word, or after another vowel with which it does not form a diphthong. Numbers are distinguished in the manuscripts by a dash over the letters, or by being enclosed by two dots. For punctuation a colon is some- times used, and it serves to divide a discourse into parts generally larger than a proposition. No Gothic manuscript, however, separates the words of a sentence, or indicates whether a vowel is long or short. The Gothic verb dis- tinguishes two voices, active and middle ; two tenses, present and past ; three moods, indica- tive, optative, and imperative ; three numbers, singular, dual, and plural; an infinitive; and a present and a past participle. According to the formation of the tenses, there are three classes of verbs: the first forms the past by reduplicating the verbal root ; the second dis- tinguishes the tenses by a change of vowel ; the third has a special form only for the present tense, forming the past by means of formative endings. Grimm designates the first two classes as strong, and the third as feeble. Examples : 1st class, blanda, blend, baibland, blended; teka, touch, taitok, touched ; 2d class, binda, band, bund, bind, bound, bound ; giba, gab, geb, give, gave, given ; 3d class, Jiaba, hdbaidm habaips, have, had, had ; sokja, sokida, sokip, seek, sought, sought. The past tense is formed in the last class by adding da, reduplicated dad, the auxiliary do, did. The verb to be is conju- gated as follows : Pres. ind. singular, im, is, ist;