Principles of reconstruction.

[ualarauans]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Justïn <justinelf at ...> wrote:
>
> Wow, I just wanted to say, with much pride, that I was able to 
follow
> and conceptualise that whole explanation...


OK, check yourself:

1. bath < PG *baþan > Go. *baþ

2. wood < PG *wiðuz > Go. *widus

3. dwarf < PG *dwergaz > Go. *dwairgs

4. edge < PG *agjô > Go. *agja

5. elbow < PG *alinô + PG *bugan- > Go. aleina "elbow" (attested, 
note the irregular –ei-, that is the long [i:] where other languages 
have a short one) + Go. *buga "bow".

6. owl < PG *uwwilôn > Go. *uggwilo (Holtzmann's Law: -ww- > -ggw- 
in Gothic).


Now you are able to write a short story. Translate into Gothic:

1. Early morning I take a bath 2. After that I put my clothes on, 
take my staff and go to the wood 3. There I see a dwarf sitting 
under a tree, on the very edge of the wood 4. He's sleeping 5. I 
push him with my elbow 6. The dwarf gets awake, sees me and climbs 
up the tree very quickly 7. Now he's looking pretty like an owl 
sitting on a twig 8. He wishes he would fly away.

It's in historical present, not to complicate things for you with 
syntetic preterite. Don't try to be always literal (to translate 
word-for-word), just use all the words we have reconstructed. To 
form the present 1st person singular ("I do/am doing something") 
just drop the final –n off the verbal infinitive. Don't use the 
pronoun (it's the same as e.g. in Spanish). That is, "I take" 
is 'nima' (from 'niman' "to take"). The 3rd person singular 
(he/she/it does/is doing smth) ends in –iþ for the verbs used in the 
story. "He's sleeping" is 'slepiþ' (from 'slepan' "to sleep"). The 
last sentence is in subjunctive, but you can have a simpler 
translation.

Some vocabulary you need:

early morning – air uhtwon

clothes – wasti F.-jo (that is, feminine jo-stem)

staff – hrugga F.-o

to push – stigqan

to get awake - gawaknan

to climb up – ussteigan

to look like – wisan galeiks (lit. "to be like") + noun in dative 
("he's looking like A." is 'ist galeiks A.'). Don't forget to put 
the A. ("owl" in our case) in dative. Consult your textbook on 
dative singular of feminine n-stems.

> I was really hoping I'd be able to journal in Gothic but the nature
> of journaling implies that I'd be fluent enough to represent a
> natural daily thought spontaneously in Gothic, whereas I'm getting
> the idea now that it would be such an effort and require so many
> resources to coin neologisms and reconstructions that it'd be very,
> very laboured, much too much for journaling.


That depends on what your natural daily thoughts are about :) If you 
dream of knights, battles, sacking, pillaging, marauding etc Gothic 
is quite OK. But if it's about electronics, PCs, oil import, smart 
weapons, flight to Mars and presidential elections in the USA, 
you'll have some hard time with reconstructing new vocabulary items 
and getting our "probo" certificate for them :)

Perhaps you should know one more thing about Gothic (sai, runa izwis 
qiþa). The fact is that Gothic is the simplest language I've ever 
met, with the possible exception of Esperanto. Of the dead 
languages, it is much easier to study than Latin and can't be even 
compared in this respect with Ancient Greek. When you approach 
Hebrew or Old Church Slavonic you start to think Gothic was just a 
children's game. If you'll ever try to reconstruct Alanic, you'll 
understand how elementary the rules of making Gothic from PG are. 
All in all, Gothic is very simple (not to say primitive), "and 
that's a very encouraging thought" – (c)

Ualarauans

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20080210/a44dd26c/attachment.htm>