[gothic-l] Re: Gothic

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

>--- In gothic-l at y..., "Le Bateman" <LeBateman at N...> wrote:
>> I got this off the Gothic language website which I do not know if 
>this is
>> actual Gothic is does not look what I have seen on the list here.   
>ni was
>> im rumis in stada þamma
>> there was no room for them in the inn. I thought the  negation was 
>Na  this
>> does not look like Gothic.
terms/ 

Hello !   

I recognized this fragment as being from the Xmas gospel.
("because there was no room for them in the inn") which is Luke 2:7.

According to the Gothic Bible the text should read:

       unte ni was im rumis in stada þamma.

(that's why I don't really like web pages. because there are all
kinds of errors. any one who thinks it "cool" can make one.)

I am not good at Gothic at all, and I don't have time to analyze
the sentence either, but just looking at it, inspecting it, it
appears to me that a translation into modern German might go something
like this:

       unde nie war es Raum (für ihnen) in der Stadt.

(well, I had to do som e leafing after all, because initially I
didn't understand þamma - it wasn't in the dictionary either)

I suspected that it was a demonstrative, however, and found it
Braune/Ebbinghaus § 153, where you can see it a neut./masc. sing.
dative of "sa". And this I find interesting, because if I am not
mistaken, this is one of the features that Old Norse shares with
Gothic, namely the demonstrative "sá".

§ 152 op.cit. you will also find "im" as the 3rd person plural
dative personal pronoun. So that would give you "them".
So I guess you then get the English translation

     and/since not was for them room in that town.   

rumis = genitive sg. of *rum.
stada = dative sg. of staþs.
Why one uses the genitive for the room, I have no idea.

Best regards
Keth



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