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.