New Member Introduction (Gothic greetings)

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Ian Ragsdale" <delvebelow at ...> wrote:
>
> LN,
>  I'll say that I stand corrected.  I took it as perhaps an archaic
> imperative, an opinion I based on the Greek source.


Hails (sijais) Ian!

I guess we could describe this Gothic greeting as a sort of
abbreviated imprerative.  Elsewhere in Germanic, the verb is often
explicit, as in Old English: wes hál; wesaþ hále (plural); wes þú hál;
hál wes þú; hál westú; welgá; béo gesund; wes gesund; sý þú hál, léof.
 Old High German: heil uuisthu.  Old Norse: ver heill; vertu heill;
far heill; far nú heill ok vel; heill kom þú; kom þú heill; heill
skaltu; sitið heilir--besides abbreviated examples where the verb is
omitted: heill þú nú; gefendr heilir; heilir æsir,  heilar  ásynior.

As you can see, there's some freedom in these languages over the word
order.  In Gothic, it's often hard to be sure about what the natural
word order would have been, since the texts that survive are mainly a
literal translation from Greek which tries to follow the Greek word
order as far as possible.  But there is some evidence, from expamples
where the translator was forced to use more that one word to render a
single Greek word, of a tendency in Gothic to place a verb after its
compelment except in certain contexts, one of these exceptional
contexts being imperative clauses.  There the verb usually comes
before the complement, thus:

wairþ hrains! "become clean" (be healed)
hrains warþ "he became clean" (was healed)

(The one exception I'm aware of to the rule that imperative verbs are
fronted--where there is no Greek model to account for the word
order--is Romans 12:20: mat gif = YWMIZE "give food".)  But Gothic
always uses subjunctive forms in place of the imperative of the verb
'wisan' "to be", and these regularly follow the complement, even when
used in this function:

hulþs sijais "be kind"

Only when the subjunctive is negated is the verb often placed before
its complement:

ni sijais unkarja = MH AMELEI "do not be neglectful"

So for this reason, we can perhaps suppose that 'hails', as a
greeting, is short for the unattested 'hails/haila sijais',
'hailai/hailos/haila sijaiþ'.

Lama Nom

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