[gothic-l] Gothic Language Corner 11

Fri Feb 13 02:20:37 UTC 2015

Dear Roel, 

 I'm not sure which features you are referring to here: the division into elements or the presence or absence of an accent over <ai>. As to the former, the separation is to break down the word into its part etymologically: thus "af-airz-jan" says as much as prefix af- + root -airz- + infinitive ending of an i-stem. As to the latter, the acute accent over the 'i' of <ai> indicates that the vowel captured by <ai> does NOT descend from Proto-Germanic /ai/. I cite here a passage from Lambdin's >Introduction to the Gothic Language< (2006, p. xiv) concerning this convention:

 "Since the early years of Indo-European studies it has been a convention in Gothic grammars to indicate the historical distinctions between ai [with acute accent over the 'a'] = PG *ay, the diphthong [ay] as in 'nice', and ai [with acute accent over the 'i'] = PG *i. A third ai, printed with no diacritic, is allegedly found prevocalically in a few words, i.e. saian (to sow), faian (to find fault), waian (to blow), where it corresponds to PG *ae, the [ae] of 'at, sat' but longer. And likewise for au [with acute accent over the 'a'] = PG *aw, the diphthong [aw] in 'house', au [with acute accent over the 'u'] = PG *u and au [no accent] = ?PG *o [long o] or [long u]. We see no need to follow this convention since it implies that each of these digraphs actually had these three different pronunciations in Gothic, for which there is no evidence whatsoever."

 As to Robert Pfeffer's readings, he, of course, follows modern thinking on <ai> and <au> and pronounces them as monothongs. He goes very quickly, but the only thing I would question is his pronunciation of /h/. He pronounces it as 'ch' in German 'Bach, Fach, Buch' etc. The fact that <h> in the Gothic Bible is subject to assimilation (e.g. jah than > jath than) or outright loss suggests, rather, that the <h> was more likely like the 'h' in ModE 'hand, hold' etc. Moreover, he does not attempt apparently to capture a phonemic difference in vowel length, which I am somewhat inclined to think is possibly right, although most Gothic scholars today usually maintain a system wherein there is a meaningful difference in vowel quantity, thus the 'a' in '-hah-', for example, is thought to be twice as long as the 'a' in 'was.'

 Edmund

---In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, <roellingua at ...> wrote :

 Hi Edmund, 

abgeben -- einen Teil abgeben: got. afdailjan*
abirren: got. afaírzjan 6, af-aírz-jan,  sw. V. (1): -- von irdischer Abkunft: got. aírþakunds* 1, aír-þ-a-kun-d-s*,
„abscheiden“: got. afskaidan 6, af-skai-d-an, 

 What would be the difference in pronunciation and is his assumption correct?

 I also have a question, are these spoken texts in Gothic a correct pronunciation?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkYJYrYFVz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkYJYrYFVz8

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD9WxPVDr_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD9WxPVDr_Y

 2015-02-13 1:20 GMT+01:00 edmundfairfax at ... mailto:edmundfairfax at ... [gothic-l] <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com mailto:gothic-l at yahoogroups.com>:
   Dear Roel,

 You'll need to give me some examples from Koebler in order to be able to answer.

 Audamunds

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20150212/bfc14182/attachment.htm>