[gothic-l] Re: a Gothic poem (comparatives, adverbs, ai)

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "rausch_roman" <aranwe at m...> wrote:
> >Did David Salo's lessons cover the different classes of adjective?
> 
> Just WA- and JA-stems. At least so far...
>...Yet for a beginner like me a prescriptive source is much 
> easier to digest than a descriptive one.


I started out with Wright's grammar.  I found it presented the 
paradigms without too many confusing digressions (although there is 
some discussion in each section on the origin of the Gothic forms).  
Alphabet and pronunciation are dealt with at the beginning.  You can 
then skip the chapters on Indo-European and Germanic sound changes 
to get straight to the Gothic grammar itself.  Braune's Gotische 
Grammatik has more notes on manuscript variations and references.  
Streitberg's Elementarbuch is probably easier to navigate online 
than these others currently.

You might find this site useful too.  Click on Wordcraft for 
paradigms, but note that in the masculine sg. of JA-stem 
adjectives, -jis,-e should read jis,eis.  Which ending is used 
depends on the same rules as masc. JA-stem nouns.

http://www.stormloader.com/carver/gutrazda/




> >For the moment, until I know better, I'm following the 
pronunciation
> >scheme in the early sections of Wright's grammar with one
> >difference, namely I use a long open [E:] (as in my British
> >pronunciation of English <fair>) for <ai> in the inflections of 
Weak
> >Class 3 verbs.
> 
> But this would be then libaíþ in the diacritic transcription..
> Do I get it right - even if "ai" had been a diphtong once in this 
> ending it became a monophtong due to the unstressed position (as 
the 
> stress remains on the stem)?


Actually <ai> with no diacritic at all, the long mid-open vowel as 
in 'saian' "to sow".  But this is just my guess for the moment, 
following the instructions in the Vienna-Salzburg Codex.  I don't 
know enough about the prehistory of Gothic to say whether it's 
scientifically justified to pronounce this as <ai> = /E:/ while 
still using /ai/ in other unstressed endings such as 'anstáis' "of 
grace".  (Any advice welcome, folks...)  I tend to leave off the 
diacritics altogether when typing, because there are so few words 
preserved of Gothic that you soon learn which sound is intended.  
But they are very handy to begin with.  <e> and <o> can safely be 
written without length marks if you like since they always indicate 
a long vowel.

Llama Nom





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