Derrivation suffixes in Gothic

[anheropl0x]

No, these all came from my friend who works with Germanic languages even more than I do. He sites it in an e-mail as just Slocum & Krause. So I'm not sure where it came from.

Basically, yes.
Verbal nouns, or abstract nouns, like in your original post (the search) can be made from weak nouns of specific classes, and are declined like i-stems. The differences, according to Wright, are that 2 & 3 class weak verbs are declined one way, and 1 class another. Where they differ is that the nom. and gen. pl. of class 1 verb-nouns are like the o-declension, but otherwise follow the i-stem like the other two classes.
Example: class 2: nom. sing. mitons (from miton), nom. pl. mitonies, gen. pl. mitone
         class 3: nom. sing. libains (from liban), nom. pl. libaineis, gen. pl. libaine
         class 1: nom. sing. laiseins (from laisjan), nom. pl. laiseinos, gen. pl. laiseino

When you're trying to find the nomina agentis, though, the two versions from the table are what you will use. Here's where it gets confusing. -arja, for all of the examples I can find, follows a noun. (bokareis = boka + arja, laisareis = laiseins + arja) You might wonder, in the case of laisareis, why not just go from the verb to nomina agentis, rather than verb to noun to nomina agentis? That's what -and is for after all (nasjands = nasjan + and), but keep in mind that this form literally means "the Xing one," where X is the verb. Nasjands is the masc. nom. sing. present participle of nasjan, and means saving. But to say sa nasjands would be "the saving one" or savior. So why not use *laisjands? Other than the fact that there is the word talzjands which means the same thing, I can't pinpoint the reason why. I can come up with a few theories though: 1. The corpus that we have is almost nothing but Biblical writings, a huge portion of which is merely a Greek-Gothic gloss. Not very handy for every day, common Gothic speech. 2. It's possible that these words, while Gothic in formation, were meant to be somewhat more abstract or carry a different weight. 3. Or maybe Gothic was just a weird language like the ones that exist today and have seemingly unrelated words for related things, like English watch (that you wear on your arm) and clock (that you put on a wall). I'm not sure, but part of me wants to say that if you make a noun with -and, it should be declined like -nd stems, such as frijonds and nasjands. But if you're keeping it as an adjective, remember to decline it as such and not mix the two up.

Hopefully someone can help me with that.

But as you can see, -arja isn't for -jan verbs at all, but for nouns and nouns derived from verbs. -and is for everything, but is basically for making present participles, and simply using them as a noun. I hope this helps, if you have any more questions, please ask.

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "kevin.behrens at ..." <becareful_icanseeyourfuture at ...> wrote:
>
> Hey,
> have you written that on your own? I really thank you! That's amazing. But some questions still remain. 
> Are -arja and -and the only suffixes to mark an agent noun? And are they in a free variety or is -arja just for -jan verbes and the -and for all other verbs? 
> It's pretty good to finally see a chart of the suffixes in gothic. But is there a certain rule, how these endings are divided? 
> And how are those forms built as: "the making" etc.?
> Thank you very much for so far! ;)
> Liubos goleinins
> Kevin
>


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