News website in Gothic, it's here

[David Connolly dec.phd@sbcglobal.net [gothic-l]]

A quick thought (all I have time for today) to add to Edmund's point 1 - Given the cultural context in which Gothic existed when it was written down, I should think that Greek rather than Latin prefixes would be better candidates for proposed neologisms.  We're basically making stuff up, but the more our made up stuff can emulate (what we believe is) the real stuff - the better, in my opinion.

That being said, I know even less Greek than Latin, so I would be little to no help in this undertaking.  (-;

Happy weekend to all,
David



________________________________
 From: "edmundfairfax at yahoo.ca [gothic-l]" <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com>
To: gothic-l at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2014 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: [gothic-l] News website in Gothic, it's here
 


  
A few more points, if I may.

1) Any neologisms that one might wish to create should use only Gothic elements and adhere to strictly what can be reconstructed as productive Gothic word-formation principles. A creation such as *interthiudisk- fails to do this: 'inter-' is a Latin prefix, not a Gothic one. If one is to going to follow this cut-and-paste method, then the Russian prefix 'mezhdu-' would work just as well, or the Sanskrit or Japanese equivalent. I doubt very much that a fourth-century Goth would have understood such a word as *interthiudisk-, since 'inter-' was not part of the language.

2) To state that Wulfila created "lots" of neologisms is pretty much ungrounded. We don't know and cannot know to what extent the Biblical translation employed coinages: one would need to have a complete description of the language with a complete lexicon predating the Biblical translation to compare and contrast, which of course does not exist. Indeed, it is moot whether Wulfila was in fact the actual translator of all or any part of the extant Bible: stylistic studies of the Gospels have suggested that there was not a single translator.

3) As to "analaugniba biniuhsjan": 'biniuhsjan' glosses Greek 'kataskopein,' which already means "to spy out," so the adverb 'analaugniba' strikes me as being quite redundant (cf. the OE cognate 'neosian').

Edmund
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