century, events, deaths

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell@> wrote:
> >
> > Or alds (like Icelandic öld, which can mean both "era, age" and
> > "century", nítjánda öldin "the 19th century"), or if the context
> > didn't make it clear whether you were meant "era" or "century", you
> > could always go with the obvious: taihuntehund jere "a hundred 
> years",
> > twa hunda jere "two hundred years", etc.
> 
> alds seems OK. BTW I wanted to construct an example with "the 20th 
> century" and it turned out that I don't know how to 
> say "twentieth". "nineteenth" is *niuntaihunda (weak adj.), from 
> *niuntaihun "19" and not to confuse with niuntehund "90". In writing, 
> you could probably just write sa .k. aiws / so .k. alds, but how to 
> say it? The same concerns "30th", "40th" etc. Any ideas?

Old English turns the -tig of the cardinal decades into -tigoþa for
the ordinals: twéntigoþa, þrittigoþa, féowertigoþa, fíftigoþa, ...,
hundtéontiogoþa. When combined with a unit, either the decade or the
unit, there are two possibilities: twá and twenigoþa; óþer éac
twentigum. Old High German has: zweinzugôsto, drîzugôsto, ...,
zehanzugôsto. Units are added without a conjunction: niunzugôsto
fiordo. Old Norse adds the suffix -andi: tuttugandi, þrítugandi,
fertugandi, fimmtugandi, ...  The ordinals of 100 and 1000 aren't
recorded in Old Norse, but Modern Icelandic has: hundraðasti,
þúsundasti. It turns both decades and units into ordinals and places
them either way round: tuttugandi ok fyrstr, fyrstr ok tuttugandi.

Which gives us a few possibilities for Gothic. Maybe we should avoid
working backwards from Old Norse -gandi on the assumption that this
could be a later form created by analogy with the teens. -da is
attested as an ordinal suffix in Gothic, so we could reconstruct
*-tiguþa (with devoicing of /d/ to /þ/ according to the usual rule of
dissimilation), or possibly *-tiguda (with restoration of /d/ by
analogy). Or, on the basis of Old High German, we could reconstruct
*-tugosta.

*twai-tiguþa
*twai-tigosta

Alternatively it might be better to dodge the issue of suffixes and
reconstructions and just assume that the word for decade remained a
noun still in Gothic, as with ordinals: anþar tigus, þridja tigus, ...
etc. Compare the Old Norse idiom: hálfr þriði tøgr manna "25 men"
(literally "half [of] the third decade of men); hálft annat hundrat
"150" (literally "half [of] the second hundred).

LN

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