Reconstructing Gothic

Mon May 26 20:31:16 UTC 2014

Dirk and everybody,

All of Edmund's points are well taken indeed.  The Gothic corpus that we have preserves 45 instances of 'aithei', including Nom., Acc., Dat., Gen. forms in the singular, and Acc. plural.  The number of occurrences of *modar is *zero*.  

Our best bet for deciding which form "the Goths" would have used is to query Gothic as it is actually preserved (i.e., Wulfila's Bible).  Even if some Goths (some sub-dialects, some regions?) had a word like *modar, what we have attested is 'aithei'.  If we are so attracted to 'modar' due to its similarity to our modern cognates, then it seems that we are embarking on something other than recovering/reestablishing Gothic; rather, we are making up sort of a pan-Germanic lingo that might be fun but shouldn't be called Gothic.  (Similar sentiments apply to recent comments about 'wreitan' (sp?) for 'write' versus [attested] meljan.)

It is interesting that there are a couple hundred (I believe) examples of 'atta' as father;  but in keeping perhaps with Dirk's suggestion, there is indeed *one* example of 'fadar' in Wulfila.  The Gothic word for father seems to have been 'atta', but with the lexical item of 'fadar' lurking in the recesses of at least some Goths' minds - ?

I appreciated the point a few messages ago about the restoration/enhancement of Hebrew in the 20th century in Israel; it is true, an ancient language was revamped and modernized to become a major world vernacular.  But of course, the Hebrew example had a large worldwide population of (mostly) Jews, coming together as a group with a shared identity in a specific region (Palestine); in other words, all the makings for a major linguistic coup, combining a traditional holy tongue with modernity.  We Gothic fans, however, alas, are quite a ways from anything like that.  We are reveling in the fact that there are a few like-minded individuals out there at least in the world of the internet.  I am wondering how familiar any of y'all are with the process by which Modern Icelandic has dealt with new words (including technological, scientific, etc.)--I understand that they have a process of creating "natively" Icelandic versions of said new words. 

Comments offered in all good fun and best wishes -
David  

________________________________
 From: "d.faltin at hispeed.ch [gothic-l]" <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com>
To: gothic-l at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Monday, May 26, 2014 3:48 PM
Subject: Re: [gothic-l] Reconstructing Gothic

Hi Edmund,

your point regarding Gothic aithei (mother) is well taken and valid. However, just to add Old High German also preserved this form as "eide" meaning mother (in a certain legal context) and "fotar eidi" meaning nurse, i.e. woman nursing a child.
The problem would have been to decide which form the Goths would have used. My guess is that they also had a world like *modar, but it was simply not recorded.

Best
Dirk
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