[gothic-l] Gothic "sa"

[David Salo]

Magnus Hreinn Snædal wrote
>First:
>Gothic 'sa' is NOT an article, but a demonstrative, cf. Braune/Ebbinghaus
>§153.

    That's the kind of bald statement which would be much improved if it
carried some justification along with it.  How exactly does one test
whether a certain determiner is an article or a demonstrative in any case?
The semantic overlap is rather considerable.
    I am probably not going to put myself to the trouble of tracking down
what Herr Ebbinghaus has to say on the subject, so unless Magnus or someone
else cares to summarize their arguments, I expect to continue to doubt the
complete accuracy of the statement.
    In reading Gothic texts, I normally experience no sense of semantic
incongruity in rendering sa, so, thata as "the" in English; whereas
translating it as "that, those" is often (not always) awkward (e.g. "swaei
frauja ist sa sunus mans jah thamma sabbato" -- "so the son of man is also
lord of the Sabbath" is perfect, but "so that son of man is also lord of
that Sabbath" is execrable).  Perhaps that simply indicates that English
"the" overlaps the boundaries of "article" and "demonstrative" that exist
as idealized grammatical categories; BUT in making a statement about the
nature of Gothic "sa" to a largely English-speaking audience, saying that
it's _not_ an article ("the" being a paradigmatic article to
English-speakers) is considerably misleading.  If people force themselves
to translate Gothic "sa" as "that" at every instance, they're going to
produce rather bad translations.
    I do note that there are many instances where a "the" must be supplied
in translating from Gothic to English; but this is the kind of thing which
a French-speaker, for instance is likely to notice about English itself
(e.g., why do Anglophones say "liberty" instead of "the liberty"?).
Obviously the use of "sa" is not identical to the use of English "the" (let
alone French "le" or German "der", which have different distributions); but
calling "sa" a "demonstrative" doesn't really help us figure out when to
use "sa" with a noun and when not to.  Previous mention isn't a completely
helpful rule either; in the example I mentioned (Mark 2:28), the "son of
man" hasn't been mentioned _at all_ within the previous discourse unit!

>(If there is only one can be disputed, cf. 'und þridjan himin' in 2 Cor 12:2.)

   There's also Ephesians 4:10 "ufar allans himinans".  But that's rather
beside the point, as it expresses the part of the Hellenistic-Jewish
worldview from which these texts spring (and tells us nothing about the
Goths).  Himins (repeatedly found both in singular and plural) is from the
point of view of the earthbound unique.  If one takes the use of "sa" to be
specifying a particular thing out of a field of like things, then obviously
one would _not_ use it with himins! (Actually this does not appear to be
the only use of "sa").  One might take himins as the effective equivalent
of a toponym.


/\     WISTR LAG WIGS RAIHTS
\/            WRAIQS NU IST                               <> David Salo
<dsalo at softhome.net> <>



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