A short gothic poem

[Edmund]

1) "sijain" should be 'sijai'

2) There seems to be much confusion about the formation of the Gothic passive. A careful look in a good grammar, such as Braune's (5.1, 2004), will reveal that there is an inflected passive only in the present indicative and present subjunctive; in the preterite, a paraphrastic construction is used consisting of a suitable preterite form of the auxiliary 'wisan/wairthan' and the past participle of the main verb. I quote from the Braune:

"Das Passiv ist nur noch in einigen Formen des Indikativ und Optativ Praes. vorhanden...die fehlenden Passivformen werden umschrieben durch das Part. Praet. mit dem entsprechenden Formen von 'wairthan' oder 'wisan', z.B. 'daupjada' "werde getauft' (Mk. 10,38), aber 'daupiths was' 'wurde getauft' (Mk. 1,19)."

The present passive is formed by using the stem of the infinitive, not the preterite. Thus, 'fulhada' is altogether incorrect.

It should also be noted that there is no perfect in Gothic. A passive can have both an active or stative sense. As an example of the stative sense, consider the following line from the Gothic Bible:

"hwana wileith ei fraletau izwis? Barabban thau Jesu, saei haitada Xristus?" (Mat. 27,17)
'Whom do you want me to release to you? Barabbas or Jesus, who is called Christ?'

Here 'haitada', the third-person singular present indicative passive of the verb 'haitan', clearly has a stative rather than active sense; the subordinate clause could also be rendered as 'whose name is Christ'. Thus, it does not follow that ''filhada' 'is buried' must have only an active sense, and not a stative sense.

3) The Goths employed the convention of scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), that is, writing without spaces between words (e.g. "tobeornottobethatisthequestion"). But in modern editions, words are normally separated by spaces, and prefixes and suffixes are written together with the word they belong to without the use of hyphens. Thus "af-grundithai" ought to be written 'afgrundithai'.

4) The form "afilhada" lacks the 'f' of the prefix and should be 'affilhada'.




--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Grsartor at ... wrote:
>
> Sorry to quibble at this stage, but:
>  
> (i) I think "sijain" should be "sijai".
>  
> (ii) I think the original choice of "fulhan" for "(lying) buried" was  
> right. The form "filhada" means that a thing is buried in the sense that someone 
>  is in the act or habit of burying it. Since the burial is complete you 
> want the  past participle, which is passive in sense. In the modern Germanic 
> languages it  is apparently active when used with "have" as an auxiliary, but 
> this  construction I think was adopted from the Latin tongues, and does not 
> appear in  Gothic. In any case the true passive sense is brought out in 
> modern German, or  occasionally in English, e.g.
>  
> The police have got the building surrounded (= the police have surrounded  
> the building).
>  
> Gerry T.
>  
>  
> In a message dated 05/07/2013 21:19:17 GMT Daylight Time, nodead4 at ...  
> writes:
> 
> Understood!
> 
> Therefore, the poem finally is of this  form:
> 
> Hvar ist othal unsar? / Hvar ist arbi unsar?
> Afilhada  ufarmaudeins af-grundithai 
> Hindana  thizos ahwos,  aiwis andéis  
> Wulthag sijain fraweit. 
> 
> I was using "heritage" as broadly meant,  so I finally choose "arby" 
> instead of "othal" then. I guess you should be  credited in the recording booklet!!
> 
> Many thanx to all.  
> 
> 
> 
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "nodead4" <nodead4@>  wrote:
> >
> > Hello all, I have composed a short poem Gothic  language. I'm not a 
> linguist nor an expert, so there will be several mistakes.  Some help is 
> requested to make it right. (This is part of a song in english,  but I wanted to 
> include this speech in a middle section).
> > 
> >  
> > Hvar ist othal unsar? (where is our heritage?)
> > Fulhans ana  ufar maudeis af-grunditha (buried into the abyss of oblivion)
> > Thairh  thata ahwa,  aiws and�is (across the river, the end of an era)
> >  Wolthags fraweit wisan. (Glorious revenge be)
> > 
> > 
> > Thanx  in  advance.
> >
> 
> 
> 
> 
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