New Member Introduction (Gothic greetings)

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "Fredrik" <gadrauhts at ...> wrote:
>
> So a greeting such as 'Hails allaim' would instead be 'Hailos 
> allai' ??

Depends on the gender.  'alls' ought to be nominative, and it should
agree with 'hails'.  If you're addressing males, 'hailai (allai)',
females 'hailos (allos)'; if you're addressing more than one person
and that includes male and female individuals (especially a couple or
just a small number), you can use neuter 'haila alla'. This seems like
a good idea for modern reinvented Gothic as a default where you don't
know who the (plural) audience includes. Judging by the Gothic Bible,
it might also have been possible to use masculine plural as a default
where the audience included female members, which ties in with the
fact that the feminine gender is more grammatically marked in old
Indo-European languages generally; in Old Norse, for example (as in
Gothic and Greek), the masculine pronouns are used in the singular in
an indefinite context where no particular individual is being
mentioned: 'sahvazuh saei' "whoever".

Where a particular noun is expressed, that will usually determine the
gender of the adjectives, thus we could reconstruct: 'hailos allos
þiudos' "hail all peoples/nations" (feminine plural); 'haila alla
þiuda' "hail all people / the whole people" (feminine singular); haila
alla manaseþ(s) "...all mankind" (feminine singular, without 's' in
the vocative, but in the two examples of 'hails' used as a greeting in
the Gothic Bible, one has nominative and one vocative, both in
agreement with the Greek on that score); 'hails alls
fairhvu(s)/fairhvau' "hail to the whole world" (fairhvau being an
alternative form of the vocative here, rather than dative); 'hail
all(ata) *fulk' "...all people" (neuter singukar); 'haila guda' "hail
ye gods" (neuter plural). I'm assuming the long form of the neuter
-ata wouldn't be used with 'hail' in this context since the rule is
that it can only be added, optionally, where the adjective is used
attributively, not where the adjective is used predicatively.

Lama Nom

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