Auhjodjus Þahainais

[Grsartor at AOL.COM]

Hailai
 
A question that arose out of Johann's translation of The Sound of Silence  
was how to express "like" in Gothic. What I give here will not help him to  
decide how, if at all, to amend his translation, but may none the less be of 
 interest.
 
Adverbial use of "galeiko" seems to be alleged only in Philippians 2:6. The 
 relevant words and the corresponding Greek are these:
 
...saei in gudaskaunein wisands ni wulwa rahnida wisan sik galeiko  guda
 
...hos en morphe theou hyparchwn oukh harpagmon hegesato to einai isa  thew
 
I was puzzled by the last word but one of the Greek. Formally it is the  
neuter plural of the adjective "isos", meaning "the same". Happily, I have 
just  found in an analytical lexicon of NT Greek that in this line the use of 
"isa"  was adverbial, and meant "on an equality". So did Wulfila make a 
somewhat  literal translation here of a Greek idiom? This would possibly not be a 
great  surprise since in other ways he seems to follow his original very 
closely.  Consider, e.g., the Greek idiom "to have badly" meaning to be ill. 
Wulfila  several times renders this as "ubil haban", and once even more 
literally as  "ubilaba haban" (Mark 2:17). I wonder what effect such alien idiom 
would have  had on the Goths: could such strange expressions have given the 
NT an aura of  mystery?
 
All this will not, admittedly, help with how to express "like" in Gothic,  
which is the question that started my inquiries, and indeed it possibly 
muddies  the waters. But at least I feel it makes a line of Wulfia's Gothic less 
 puzzling, since otherwise I should have expected the last word but one to 
be  "galeikana".
 
Gerry T.


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

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20110103/3c98de17/attachment.htm>