Principles of reconstruction.

[ualarauans]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell at ...> wrote:
>
> Or maybe better to reconstruct a hypothetical cognate of Modern
> English 'bathe' and say literally "I bathe myself"? OE. baþian, ON.
> baða, OHG. badôn, bathôn, Mod.G. baden, Du. baden would give us in
> Gothic a Weak Class 2 verb, *baþon, with which you'd use the 
reflexive
> pronoun for the object (as in Icelandic: ég baða mig), thus Gothic:
> air uhtwon baþo mik. 

Yes, baþo mik sounds definitely better than nima baþ. The latter is 
an obvious Anglicism. I introduced it because we had to use the 
reconstructed *baþ in the text.

One more dubious issue is bistigqan bi acc. I suspect it's more "to 
stumble over smth." than "to push" or "to touch". But how can you 
stumble with your elbow, unless you crawl on all fours? The sentence 
#5 should be 'bistigqa bi ina fotau', taking into consideration the 
usual size of dwarves. Or, maybe, 'bistigqa bi aleina is fotau 
meinamma' lit. "I stumble over his elbow with my foot"?

The dwarf sitting on a tree twig (Go. tains M.-a) and resembling an 
owl reminds me exactly of the "Wild Man in The Wood" we talked of 
recently. Cf. Irish Suibhne geilt living on trees and perhaps also 
the Nahuatl (Aztec) word for "demon" (= Go. skohsl) – tlâcatecolôtl, 
lit. "man-owl", used in the Anales de Cuauhtitlan of the gods whom 
human sacrifices were due to.

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