[gothic-l] Reflexive pronouns + sa/is revisited

[Grsartor at AOL.COM]

This email might better be called Sa, Is, and Wright. It is about the remark 
by Wright in his Grammar of the Gothic Language concerning the use of the 
pronouns "sa" and "is". Llama_nom unearthed the following from paragraph 431:

"IS is sometimes used where we should expect 
SA". He gives these examples:

(1) iþ is dugann merjan filu...swaswe is ni mahta in baurg galeiþan
"and he (the beggar) began to tell everyone...so that he (Jesus) 
couldn´t go into the city"

(2) saei bigitiþ saiwala seina fraqisteiþ izai, jah saei fraqisteiþ 
saiwalai seinai in meina, bigitiþ þo.

Perhaps to avoid the kind of ambiguity that arises in English when there are 
two people that could be "he", as in (1) above Wulfila distinguished between 
them by use of "is" and "sa", possibly in a way natural to Gothic, or perhaps 
in imitation of the original Greek, which in the passage in question, Mark 
1:45, uses two different pronouns: "ho de" - "and he" for the beggar, and "auton 
dynasthai" - "him to be able" for Jesus. I have an impression that "ho de" in 
Greek is used to introduce a contrast: X did one thing but Y did another. 
However, further comment on this should come not from me but from folk with good 
knowledge of Greek. It would also be useful to have a list of sentences in which 
Gothic uses both "is" (or ina etc) and "sa" (or thana etc). Does anyone know 
how to make a word processor search in the required manner?

I can shed no light on (2). There seems to be no ambiguity in the Greek of 
Matt 10:39, from which (2) comes, even though the same word "auten" corresponds 
to both "izai" and "þo" in the Gothic.

Another thing about pronouns. In paragraph 263 of Wright it is stated that 
"sein" and its derivatives are used only when they refer to the subject of the 
sentence they are in. But consider Matt 8:22,

    let þans dauþans gafilhan seinans dauþans.
    leave the dead to bury their dead.

The subject of this sentence is the implicit "þu" of the imperative "let", 
and so here the rule is broken. The placement of "seinans" is also unusual. 
Perhaps both features are something to do with the original Greek, which has the 
reflexive possessive heautón instead of the more usual autón (the accent on the 
o, if it has transmitted right, is meant to show that the vowel is long, 
being omega), and places it before its noun, as in the Gothic. Perhaps the 
construction was emphatic. Again, it would be useful to have the help of someone 
competent in Greek.

Gerry T.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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