36.1707, Reviews: Studies in Gothic: Mondon (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1707. Sat May 31 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1707, Reviews: Studies in Gothic: Mondon (2025)

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Date: 30-May-2025
From: Jean-François R. Mondon [jfmondon at gmail.com]
Subject: Historical Linguistics, Morphology, Syntax: Mondon (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-2669

Title: Studies in Gothic
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/studies-in-gothic-9780198896692?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Editor(s): Jared S. Klein, Arturas Ratkus

Reviewer: Jean-François R. Mondon

SUMMARY
The oldest attested Germanic language, Gothic, has been the focus of
countless research projects since the advent of Indo-European Studies
in the nineteenth century. In the past few decades, however, it seems
that the number of publications delving into some facet of the Gothic
language has been ever growing. It has become the fodder for several
scholars studying the language through different lenses, from
theoretical syntax to pragmatics to semantics to paleography to
traditional Indo-European historical linguistics. The volume “Studies
in Gothic” edited by Jared Klein and Arturas Ratkus offers a taste of
the current state of Gothic research, by containing twelve articles
from thirteen scholars from an assortment of linguistic subfields.
The Introduction (xiv-xviii), penned by Jared Klein, invites the
reader to understand and appreciate the mystique of the Gothic
language. This mystique, Klein is right to claim, comes in part from
its small corpus of only six manuscripts, with the Codex Argenteus
containing the overwhelming majority of the material. The existence of
speakers of a descendent language, Crimean Gothic, attested more than
a millennium after Wulifila’s Gothic translation also only piques
one’s curiosity (see Kim (2024) for a discussion of how close Crimean
Gothic actually is with 5th century Gothic). The speakers themselves
have also added to the mystique linked to the language. The Goths are,
after all, associated with the downfall of the Roman Empire and the
ushering in of the European Dark Ages. Two achievements of the 21st
century, however, directly precipitated the need for this volume. The
first is the discovery in 2010 of the Codex Bononiensia, a text with
quotations from both the New and Old Testaments. The second is the
magnum opus of the late D. Gary Miller (2019), ‘The Oxford Gothic
Grammar.’ As Klein states, “this work, the most complete and
theoretically sophisticated grammar of Gothic ever written, is
remarkable for the breadth of scholarship that it has taken into
consideration and has created a foundation upon which all Gothic
scholarship in the foreseeable future will build” (xv). The remainder
of the introduction offers a brief synopsis of the volume’s twelve
articles.
Carla Falluomini’s chapter, “Linguistic contacts and exchanges between
Ostrogoths and Romans” (1-9), focuses on the Goths in the Ostrogothic
kingdom of Italy at the start of the fifth century and their
linguistic relations with the Romans. In order to ascertain the level
of bilingualism, if any, in the community she delves into an
assortment of data from citations by classical authors, to lexical
borrowings, to funerary inscriptions. For instance, she scours
citations from classical authors indicating that Gothic was still
spoken in the area in the 6th century. She mentions a story recounted
by Procopius of a Gothic solider who, during a siege in 536/537 cursed
to fellow soldiers ‘in the paternal language’ after having fallen into
a pit. An additional indication of continued, albeit decreasing,
bilingualism is displayed in a signed document from a religious
community in 551. Only four of the eighteen signers use Gothic, the
rest either use Latin or simply write a cross. Unsurprisingly in a
bilingual environment, words were borrowed in both directions. Owing
to the paucity of the Gothic corpus, many Latin borrowings are not
often attested in the Gothic Bible itself but rather in marginal
annotations. Falluomini offers two such examples: ‘kawtsjo’ from Latin
‘cautio’ (caution) and ‘laiktsjo’ from Latin ‘lectio’ (reading), both
attest in the Ambrosianus B manuscript.
The second chapter, “The Codex Argenteus: Some English aspects and
enigmas” (10-42), co-authored by Charles Lock and the late Magnús
Hreinn Snaedel, reads like a crime novel. Their goal is to unravel how
Franciscus Junius was able to create an editio princeps of the Codex
Argenteus. While their proposal is intriguing and ultimately
plausible, perhaps the most fascinating part of their chapter is the
overview of how, as well as the possible whys, of the Codex Argenteus’
centuries-long journey from Ravenna in the Middle Ages via Westphalia
and Prague to ultimately end up in Uppsala today. They assume that the
text, despite being in an unreadable script and despite being known to
be the Bible of former adherents of Arianism, which had been deemed a
heresy by the Church, only survived because of the value associated
with the silver of its lettering.
 Brendan Wolfe explores how Greek nominal compounds are rendered into
Gothic in Chapter 3, “Greek nominal compounds in the Gothic Gospels”
(43-74). While he discovers no systematic pattern, he is able to offer
credible conjectures in specific instances as to why the translator(s)
might have made certain decisions. As just one example, the Greek word
‘chreopheilete:s’ is occasionally used in the Gospels to clarify the
sense of ‘debts’ as the result of financial obligation and not  in the
sense of ‘trespasses.’ Gothic likewise makes such a clarifying
disambiguation but not via a calque-translation of the Greek. Instead,
either it uses the compound ‘faihuskula’ which consists of ‘faihu’
(money) and ‘skula’ (debtor, guilty), or it employs the genitive
‘dulgis’ (of debt) with ‘skula’.
 Robert Howell’s “What do we really know about Gothic breaking?
(75-91)” aims to find a unifying phonetic feature lying behind the
well-known Gothic breaking. Before the consonants x, xw, and r, the
vowels i and e are lowered to a front mid lax vowel, spelled <ai>.
Relatedly, before the same trifecta of consonants the vowel u is
lowered to a back mid lax vowel, spelled <au>. Note that the vowel o
was no longer in the phonological inventory of the language, having
previously fallen together with a. Examples of both changes are ‘wair’
(man) < *wiraz (as opposed to ‘itan’ (to eat) with no breaking) and
‘sauhtins’ (illnesses (acc pl)) < *suxtinz (as opposed to ‘hunds’
(dog) < *hundaz. Wolfe concludes, that by assuming that *x and *xw had
developed to h and hw before breaking, it is possible to link the
triggering environment of breaking as “a class of approximants that
tended to interact diachronically with preceding vowels as a result of
the non-abrupt transition from vowel to following approximant” (p.
91).
 In “Gothic -ei and -itha” (92-105), the late D. Gary Miller argues
that which roots the two synonymous noun-forming suffixes attach to is
determined by prosody. After showing why previous attempts fail at
differentiating the two suffixes via some slight semantic
qualification, Miller determines that the latter overwhelmingly
attaches to heavy monosyllabic bases resulting in a dactylic
structure: ‘diupitha’ (depth) from ‘diup’s (deep). Only two exceptions
exist, with ‘dwalitha’ (foolishness) showing affixation to a weak root
and ‘weitwoditha’ (testimony) affixation to a disyllabic root. The
suffix -ei, however, had no such prosodic constraint and was liable to
attach to any root.
Patrick Stiles, in “Gothic jains, OE geon*, OHG jene:r, and congeners”
(106-124) deduces that the three forms of the title do not go back to
variant forms (cf. Cercignani 1984). Rather, all three derive from
Proto-Germanic *jaina-, whose initial vocalism results in the Old
English (OE) and Old High German (OHG) forms via shortening of the
reflexes of Proto-Germanic *ai (i.e. *a: and *e: in OE and OHG
respectively) in weakly accented contexts.
Luzius Thöny explores the apparent lengthened o-grade of the word dags
‘day’ seen in fidurdo:gs ‘four days old’ in his article, “Gothic
fidurdo:gs ‘four days old’ and some traces of denominal s-stems in
Germanic” (125-140). He argues against the approach which views the
lengthened o: as being regular in adjectives serving as the second
member of compounds, since that approach does not account for the same
lengthened vowel appearing in some simplex nouns. Rather, he derives
the unusual lengthened vowel from the noun directly and finds
parallels in *xo:nis- ‘fowl’ and *xro:this- ‘glory.’
In “A prefix-particle verb cycle in Germanic?” (141-171), Sheila Watts
discusses the prefix-particle cycle utilizing Old Saxon and Gothic
data.  With respect to Gothic, prefixed verbs are so sufficiently
lexicalized and given idiomatic semantics, that Watts concludes the
time depth of the prefixation must be rather old. She reasons that
what originally were directional prefixed have become semantically
bleached and often redundant. The pathway underpinning this
development is the use of older prefixes to express telicity.
Subsequently, new directional prefixes could be adjoined to the older
prefixed formations, though “that is not realized in any systematic
way” (p. 170).
Arturas Ratkus delves into the position of Gothic possessives in
attributive use in “Linearization of adnominal possessives in Gothic”
(172-199). The difficulty which faces any researcher trying to unearth
unadulterated Gothic syntax is separating structures which reflect
slavish translations versus native usage. Ratkus sifts through the
relevant data, rejecting data in which the position of an attributive
possessive is identical to the Greek of either the Byzantine or
Alexandrian Bible versions or to pre-Vulgate and Vulgate Latin
translations. Twenty-eight examples culled from the data exhibit a
Gothic possessive in a position not matched by any possible source
text. Ratkus concludes from the seventeen instances in which Gothic
has a possessive not attested at all in the Greek or Latin, that
modification – at least of possessives - was in the process of
undergoing a change from postnominal to prenominal position.
Wayne Harbert’s contribution, “On Gothic translations of Greek
relative pronouns” (200-230), explores the cross-linguistically unique
system of Gothic relative pronouns. Gothic employs personal pronouns
as relative pronouns adjoined with the bare complementizer ei when the
antecedent is non-3rd person. For 3rd person indefinite antecedents,
the bare complementizer ei can only be used if the relative has a
non-subject function. When the relative bears the subject role of its
clause, demonstratives adjoined with ei are employed, as izei and sei.
Gisella Ferraresi explores the functions of two particles in
“Temporally anaphoric nu and than as discourse-structuring elements in
Gothic” (231-247). Both nu and than, derived from deictic elements,
indicate a new event in a temporal sequence. Nu bears an internal
perspective while than an external one. This amounts to the difference
between ‘and now he went’ as opposed to ‘and then he went.’ Employed
as discourse particles, they occupy second position in their clause.
They trigger an interpretation, in which their own clause is in a
causal relationship with an event or a situation from a previous
discourse.
The final chapter, “Discourse articulation in the Gothic Gospels, with
notes on the treatment of the same phenomenon in the Classical
Armenian and Old Church Slavic versions” (248-293) by Jared Klein,
strives to precisely define the limits of the full panoply of Gothic
discourse particles. He concludes that “they are all capable of
linking larger discourse units of the sort that, in our curated Greek
text of the Gospels, are typically associated with verse-boundaries”
(293).
The book concludes with a references section (294-323) containing
every citation from each contribution. A subject index (324-331)
rounds out the book.
EVALUATION
This book succeeds at offering a sense of the current state of
research in the field of Gothic studies. The cross-section of
linguistic subfields represented in it illustrates well how
specialists have found fodder in the oldest Germanic language. The
most recurring theme which surfaced in several papers is the
difficulty in attempting to ascertain what reflects native Gothic
grammar and what is the result of a slavish translation. This question
applies at the morphological level in compound formation, at the
lexical level in word choice, in the syntactic level in the position
of possessive adjectives, and in the pragmatic level in delimiting the
range of discourse particles. It is in attempting to answer this
overarching question that this book has proven its merit. The
contributors who specifically focused on this question show not just
that Gothic grammar can in fact be gleaned from a corpus which is
overwhelmingly translations, they show how to do such work well. In
this regard this volume will benefit scholars working in other ancient
languages with a comparable corpus.
REFERENCES
Cercignani, Fausto. 1984. “The enfants terribles of Gothic breaking:
hiri, aiththau, etc.”, Journal of Indo-European Studies 12:315-344.
Kim, Ronald. 2024. “On the phylogenetic status of East Germanic,” in
The Method Works: Studies on Language Change in Honor of Don Ringe
(eds. J. Eska et al.), Palgrave Macmillan: 21-43.
Miller, D. Gary. 2019. The Oxford Gothic Grammar. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Jean-François Mondon is an Associate Professor of World Languages at
Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio. His research is split
between the writing of pedagogical material for ancient Indo-European
languages (to date: Classical Armenian, Latin, and Middle Welsh), and
the application of theoretical methods to Celtic data-sets, primarily
Breton.



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