Principles of reconstruction.

[Justïn]

That is a very encouraging thought, for the record...I guessed wood 
right!!!  Would the literary style of the novel work in Gothic?  
Maybe we should translate some Lewis...

I'll work on this, but it won't be pretty.

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Justïn <justinelf@> 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
>


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