Principles of reconstruction.

[Justïn]

My first response when I saw the sentence was "hmm, I'll need to look 
up "bathe" and try to reconstruct it now..."  I thought "take a bath" 
was too much of an English idiom to translate it, actually.  Bathe 
came up on the etymological dictionary I used when I first looked 
up "bath" so I assumed that would have been the word, but them I'm 
far from acting out of my own insight at this point.

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "ualarauans" <ualarauans@> wrote:
> 
> > 1. Early morning I take a bath
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Don't use the 
> > pronoun (it's the same as e.g. in Spanish). That is, "I take" 
> > is 'nima' (from 'niman' "to take").
> 
> 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. The reflexive pronoun is typically placed
> directly after the verb in this sort of context. We can tell this
> because Gothic often uses a verb + reflexive pronoun to translate
> Greek middle voice verbs, so in this instance the Gothic translation
> isn't being influenced by the Greek word order.
> 
> It's not actually incorrect to use the pronoun 'ik nima', 'ik *baþo
> mik', just (as in Spanish) more emphatic probably than it would be 
in
> English. But it's hard to be sure of natural Gothic syntax because 
the
> main surviving text is a vey literal translation from Greek, so it
> tends to use pronouns most of the time only where the Greek has a
> pronoun. There are a few examples where pronouns are used in the
> Gothic where they aren't in the Greek though (and it's much rarer 
for
> pronouns to appear in the closest Greek versions where they're 
absent
> in the Gothic), which all seems to suggest that pronouns where more
> likely to be used in Gothic than in New Testament Greek. There's 
also
> a tendency been observed by Gisella Farraresi whereby examples of
> Gothic subject pronouns in subordinate clauses that appear where the
> Greek has none occur when there is a chance of subject between the
> main clause and the subordinate clause. Again this suggests that the
> difference between Gothic and Greek texts is due to more than chance
> and probably can't be accounted for entirely by accidents in the
> transmission of the text. That said, there are great uncertainties
> over just how much subject pronouns would have been used in natural
> Gothic. Perhaps less than Old English, given the fact that Old 
English
> literal Bible glosses such as the Lindesfarne Gospels do feel the 
need
> to insert pronouns regularly in contrast to their Latin originals.
> 
> LN
>


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