New Books

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "thiudans" <thiudans at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> Hails!
> 
> Has anyone seen this book and can anyone comment on it?
> 
>
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1597523941/ref=ord_cart_shr/104-4806149-6031927?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance
> 
> Introduction to the Gothic Language
> (Ancient Language Resources)
> by Thomas O. Lambdin.
> 
> Published Jan. 2006 by Wipf & Stock.
>


Hails, Þiudan!

I haven't seen this one, I'm afraid, but I can comment on the following:

Word Order and Phrase Structure in Gothic
by G Ferraresi
ISBN: 90-429-1694-X

Published May 2006 by Peeters Publishers
http://www.peeters-leuven.be/boekoverz.asp?nr=8008

It's adapted from the author's doctoral thesis.  Although the author
makes some interesting observations, the book as a whole is flawed by
 quite a few typos and misunderstandings.  E.g. the IMP-3sg verbal
ending -adau is twice (108, 120) misidentified as MEDIOPASS-OPT-3sg
(which would be -aidau).  du "to" is mistakenly claimed to assign "all
cases but NOM" (73).  The Old Icelandic cited on p. 139, aþr alþinge
er úte sumar, should read áþr alþinge er úte í sumar.  It doesn't mean
"before everything is out in summer", but "before the { Althingi,
National Assembly } is over this summer."  Mention is made of "the
reflexive possessive pronoun sein-, which shows a full paradigm of
cases, genders and numbers" (83), whereas in fact sein- is lacking in
the nominative.

More seriously, there is a failure to recognise the extent of Greek
influence on word order in the Gothic Bible.   For large parts of the
book, Greek and Gothic verses with identical word order are cited
uncritically as evidence for Gothic.  Some claims are supported
exclusively with such examples, e.g. 29 Gothic examples are cited in §
2.8, Double Object Constructions (63-75), in every one of which the
order of arguments in the Gothic translation matches that of the Greek
text cited exactly.  Streitberg's reconstruction of the Greek source
text is cited, and endorsed with no reference to the criticisms of
Marchand and Stutz  [ http://www.wulfila.be/gothic/browse/ ]. 
Alternative readings from Nestlé-Aland are given, but the complexities
of the history behind the Gothic text are not adequately dealt with,
nor its mutual interaction with the Vetus Latina.  These are tricky
matters, and it may not be possible to get to the bottom of all such
textual problems, but the introduction seem to me rather dismissive of
the difficulties, even speaking of the "autonomy of the Gothic from
the Greek model," as if this was an either / or question.

Conversely, where differences between Greek and Gothic do occur, their
significance is sometimes ignored.  On p. 150, the particle iþ is
designated a P2 (second position) particle on the basis on just three
examples, all of which match Greek usage, in spite of 623 examples
where Gothic deviates from Greek by placing iþ first!

On occasion, the writing is rendered hard to follow or misleading by
its own word order and phrase structure: "This [the independence of
Gothic] is shown first by the fact that in some cases there is no
reflexive in Greek, or the personal pronoun is used, whereas Gothic
has a reflexive pronoun, and to a much greater extent by the fact that
in Greek there is the reflexive pronoun hEAUTON in the accusative and
hEAUTOU (which can also appear abbreviated as hAUTOU, hAUTON in the
genitive case), which is used not only for the 3rd person but also as
a reflexive pronoun for the 1st and 2nd persons" (84).  The last part
of this is presumably intended to say something like: "...the
reflexive pronoun—accusative hEAUTON, genitive hEAUTOU -- which can
also appear abbreviated as hAUTON and hAUTOU respectively."

Ch. 2 "Pronouns and Double Object Constructions" is deeply flawed by
indiscriminate use of matching examples, and to some extent by
oversights and counting mistakes.  The author makes an interesting
observation that there is always a change of subject when Gothic
nominative personal pronouns are expressed in an embedded clause while
"the Greek" doesn't express the pronoun (49), although it's unclear
from the way the data is presented, and the lack of references to
verse numbers, whether a complete survey of the corpus has been made.
 Some of the statistics given seem too low to me, e.g.

"In all 17 entries in the whole Bible, the pronoun ita never appears
in initial position, but always follows the verb in main clauses"
(60).  This same value is also given in Table 58 on p. 53.  But I
count at least 21 examples of this word form [
http://www.wulfila.be/Corpus/Search.html ], [
http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/indexe.htm ].  I'm not sure if there are
any examples in the glosses.

Ch. 3 "Reflexive Pronouns" is right to distinguish between inherent
and argumental reflexive pronouns.  The observation (attributed to
Harbert), that a high proportion of the examples of LDR-avoidance with
present participles is to be found in the Skeireins, may be
significant (95-96).

Ch. 4 "Topicalization and Discourse Particles" provides a potentially
useful summary of the use of each particle discussed, but with certain
misunderstandings and unfounded conclusions (e.g. the idea that -u
adds "an element of emotion" such as surprise or disappointment). 
Some of the comments on word order are flawed by the use of examples
where Gothic and Greek word order match, and I would question whether
auk ever really means "also" (71, 170).  Of the three supporting
examples on p. 171, F herself has only translated one as "also".  But
here, I Cor 1:16, the idea "also" is already expressed by jaþ- (jah),
translating Gk. KAI.

There are many aspects of Gothic word order that the book doesn't
address (some covered in earlier works such as those of Streitberg and
Gabelentz / Loebe), and much of the structure it does describe is NT
Greek rather than Gothic.

LN

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