Infinitives

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Le Bateman" <LeBateman at ...> wrote:
>
>   Is there a website I can go to, to learn the Gothic Grammar. 

Hi Le,

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/gotol-TC.html
http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/etc/aa_texts.html

You might also need to track down some introduction to traditional
grammatical terms, as knowledge of these is often assumed by such
books/sites.  Maybe someone else can recommend a good site for that? 
You can learn a lot with an internet search engine, or by looking up
terms at Wikipedia, e.g. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitive ].
 It might be worth spending a little time studying a better known
language for which it will be easier to find resources aimed at beginners.

> How were Infinitives form?

The infinitive ends in -an, except in one class of verbs where it ends
in -on.  The form of the root used is that of the present tense.

qiman "to come"
giban "to give"
nasjan "to save"
fullnan "to be filled"

luston "to desire"

Were all classes of verbs used to form the Infinitives?

As far as I know, every Gothic verb (of whatever class) would have an
infinitive form.  But because only a small amount of Gothic has
survived in manuscripts, verbs are often only recorded in one or a few
forms, so sometimes the infinitive has to be reconstructed. 
Historical linguists use an asterisk * before a word to show that it
is a reconstruction, not recorded in the language itself, e.g.

magt "you can"
*magan "to be able"

Enough is known about the language to be fairly sure about almost all
of these reconstructed infinitives.

LN

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20070711/8f503df2/attachment.htm>