Gothic – Morphology, Part 1
CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Goering, Nelson
Introduction to the nominal morphology of Gothic. The topics of this lecture are stem formation, nouns classes and compounding.
 Hello, I'm Nelson Gehring and I'd like to welcome you to the first of two lectures on Gothic nominal morphology. In this lecture, I will concentrate on nouns proper, focusing on their stem formation, their arrangement to inflectional classes, and the formation of compounds. Before diving into all that, I'd like to start out with a general overview of the Gothic nominal system. Gothic nominal elements include nouns as such, as well as adjectives, demonstratives, or determiners, personal pronouns, interrogative and indefinite pronouns, as well as participle, all of which may be loosely labeled as pronominal elements. Finally, there are participle which are nominalized verbs. Their name reflects the fact that they participate in both the nominal system and the verbal system, since they inflect as nominals but retain things like verbal arguments. Gothic nominals inflect for four primary cases, nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative. There is also a vocative as a marginal category. This never has a distinct ending, but is always equivalent to either the nominative or accusative in form. Nouns also inflect for number, usually either singular or plural. The personal pronouns also have a special set of dual forms in the first and second persons. Beyond this, nouns are assigned to one of three gender classes, masculine, feminine, or neuter, and most nominal elements mark gender in their inflection. Most of these categories will be familiar from other early Indo-European languages, but there is one further distinction which is more distinctive to dramatic. Adjectives have two sets of endings, one called strong and one called weak. The circumstances under which each set of endings is used will be discussed in the lectures on syntax. So, if we turn to the nouns as such, the first thing to address is stem formation. Nouns in Gothic belong to one of a number of distinct inflectional classes, each with its own patterns for marking case and number. The traditional terminology for these classes is a little bit variable. Most commonly, each inflectional class is called a stem class, with a label like A stem, O stem, N stem, etc. Germanicists will sometimes use a slightly less precise labeling grouping together, at least A and O stems, and sometimes all vocaliic stems as strong nouns and N stems as weak nouns. I will avoid doing this in these lectures and stick to the traditional stem class morphology. That said, even calling these stem classes is probably a little bit anachronistic for Gothic. It implies a morphological structure where a nominal base is regularly suffixed by a stem-formant, stem suffix, to which an inflectional suffix is added on top of it. In a few cases, the sort of decomposition does seem possible with Gothic nouns synchronically. So, for example, in the dative plural, we could in fact speak of A, O, I, and U stem-stem vowels, A, O, I, U, each of which is then followed by a single dative plural suffix, M. But more often, this stem plus ending structure is no longer synchronically present in Gothic, and the nominative singular of these nouns, of the ones mentioned so far, only Sunus, with its U vowel, actually has a distinct stem vowel on the surface. For DAX, THEUDA, and GANTS, the historical stem and ending have fused into a single element. In other words, the synchronic grammar of Gothic typically involves just a root or base plus an inflectional ending. As we will see shortly, there are still some optional stem-forming suffixes available, but the role is much more restricted than in proto-Germanic. This ending is often a single segment which conveys all the inflectional information about case and number, and to some extent about gender. I will continue to use the traditional terminology going forward, but you should understand that an A stem noun does not really have an A in its stem, or really indeed any special stem suffix at all. So, with some of the general background out of the way, let's take a look at the major noun classes of Gothic. There are four broad classes of historical, vocallic stem nouns. One of the largest categories by far is the A stem nouns. These may be either masculine, like DAX, or neuter, like WORD. We'll look at how gender inflects the inflection of the A stem subclasses shortly. For now, note that in addition to gender, there is also an important subclass of A stems formed by adding a palatal glide suffix. Because of Zephyr's law discussed in the lectures on Gothic phonology, the weight of the stem affects the surface forms of the inflection, so we have light yaw stems like masculine nithius and heavy yaw stems like masculine heredys. They're also neuter equivalents of both. Another very major noun class in Gothic are the O stem nouns. These, such as the other people, also have an important subclass formed with a palatal glide, and these are again subdivided into two classes by weight, like yaw stems and heavy yaw stems. We'll take a look at these shortly. All O stems and subtypes are feminine. The third vocallic stem class are the I stems. They're a bit less numerous than the other stem types mentioned so far, but still very important. The masculine I stems are only distinct from the A stems in the plural, but the feminine I stems have a special inflection throughout most of the paradigm, and there are several very productive feminine I stem derivational suffixes in Gothic. You can see a couple examples here on the slide. These mostly form abstract nouns to verbal and adjectival bases. Finally, at least as far as the adjectivals, the vocallic stems go, there are the U stems. The count of native Gothic words belonging to this class is pretty restricted. There's only one neuter, a handful of feminines, and a modest number of masculine. This includes two derivational suffixes, asus and odus, both of which are masculine specifically. A good number of non-Gothic names also inflect at least partly as U stems. So, if we turn from the vocallic stems to the consonant stems, the only really large class in Gothic are the N stems. These can potentially be of any gender, but the neuters are really pretty uncommon. The masculine show just one N stem inflectional type. There are however two parallel classes of feminine N stems. One has an O formant throughout the paradigm, and the other has a long I, E formant throughout the paradigm. These are called the OWN stems and the IN stems respectively. The IN stems are the more marked of the two options, and they're almost all abstract nouns derived from adjectives. So, from an adjective like LUNX, we have an abstract noun, LANGI length. The most frequently occurring word of the IN stem class, MANAGI, was probably also originally abstract noun as well to the adjective MANAX, many. But it usually has a concrete reference now to a physical multitude or a crowd. Like the O stems, we also find the N stems extended with an additional palatal glide suffix. So, we have N stems like GUDIA or ECLEISIO. The masculine YON stems in particular often form derivatives to other nouns, especially agent nouns of various types. So, GUDIA is derived from the A stem noun GUTH, GOD, and derivationally means basically a God person, someone who does the God thing, literally priest. Other than the N stems, the classes of consonant stems are all fairly small, although some of them contain some high frequency leximes. The R stems are entirely restricted to kinship terms. Here, it's probably worth pointing out that the cognates of FATHER and MOTHER, which are so widespread across the Indo-European family, have been replaced by ATTA and ATHE, respectively. FATHER is attested but only once in evocative use, and the hypothetical MODAR MOTHER is completely unattested in Gothic. Beyond the R stems, there is a class that's called the ND stem nouns. These are all D-verbal and form agent nouns. It's not a very large class, but it contains several important leximes, such as NACIANCE SAVIOR, as well as FIONCE ENEMY, and FRIONCE FRIEND. For the rest of the consonants nouns, I'll just refer you to any of the standard grammars. These are often extremely interesting nouns from the standpoint of historical grammar, but are a bit too irregular and heterogeneous to cover fully in this lecture. Gothic, of course, also has its share of genuinely irregular nouns, which are also often very interesting from a historical perspective. One particularly common one is a MANNA, a human, a person, a mortal, which partly inflects as an N stem noun, but partly as a consonant stem noun. One question that I've been skirting around a little bit in this lecture is just what I mean by a subclass. By and large, I've ignored minor variations in inflection that stem from simple morphophonemic processes, such as the deletion of final S in certain environments. You can see the third lecture on Gothic phonology for details on morphophonemics. But in cases where the surface variation is a little more drastic, it's not quite clear to what extent the variations are morphophonemic versus strictly morphological, and the answer will, of course, depend to some extent on our linguistic framework. We can see some of the difficulties by looking at one of the cases of the yod stems, with the form of the palatal glide, the feminine yod stems. Descriptively, the tradition calls these a single larger class of o-stems with two subclasses, light yod stems and heavy yod stems. And if we look at the paradigms involved, we can see that for the light yod stems, this is entirely unproblematic. There aren't even any minor alternations going on. We just have the presence of a glide before the normal o-stem endings. So if we have theuda, we have parallel to that sun-ya same ending with a palatal glide inserted before that, and you can see that it goes for the same rest of the cases all the way down. With the heavy stems, things are just a little bit more complicated. In most forms, the analysis is transparently the same. We just have a glide inserted before the ending. So in the genitive, we would have theudos in the plain o-stems and bandios in the heavy yod stems with the palatal glide inserted before the ending. But in the nominative singular, the alternation is not entirely predictable. We might expect band-ya on systematic grounds, the same ending as in theuda with the glide inserted, but instead we just have band-i. This i can safely be regarded as a syllabified palatal glide, but we're left with a null ending. That is, when compared to the other plain o-stems and the light yod stems, rather anomalous. Note that it's not just a matter of a different ending, but that there's a different pattern since the heavy yod stems show distinct nominative and accusative forms, band-i versus band-ya. While the other two stem types have a syncretism in the nominative and accusative forms. Diachronically, the explanation for this stretches back to Indo-European and the up-lout of i-h2 stems, but the synchronic status of this ending is really not entirely clear. It would certainly seem unwarranted to separate the heavy yod stems from the plain o-stems when so many forms are obviously parallel, but the strange nominative singular is difficult to derive through any recognized morphophonemic process in Gothic. We probably need at least a little strictly morphological marking of this subclass to make things work out. While I've mostly focused on inflectional classes, I should spend a brief moment on compounding in Gothic, which is an important and probably productive feature of the grammar. Both compound nouns and adjectives are reasonably common, and formally, compounds very often show a linking vowel between the two elements. The most common connecting vowel is a, which was the historical stem vowel of the a-stems, and a reduced form of the stem vowel of the o-stems. This a is also used when the first element is a plain n-stem. In the yaw-stems, we can see a weight-based alternation. The light yaw-stem simply preserves both the glide and the linking vowel as an al-ya. While the heavy stems syncopate the a, leaving the glide alone, now vocalized to an i as an ar-vi-num-ya, a heavy yaw-stem. In the a- and the u-stems, we usually see their historical stem vowel as the composition vowel, so an i-stem, nor the, and a u-stem for the. In a few a-stems, such as Guthus, Temple, literally Godhouse, the linking vowel has been dropped, so Guth is an a-stem noun. There may have been competing pressures, especially on the a-stems. On the one hand, a linking vowel was useful and helped avoid potentially awkward combinations and junctures. On the other, the stem vowel is no longer synchronically present in the a-stems, and there may have been some pressure to have the first elements of compounds align more superficially with the independent form of the noun. Forms aside, semantically gothic compounds can show a range of relationships between the two elements, but as a general rule, the compounds as a whole strongly tend to be endocentric. Fingraguth, finger gold, really is a type of gold, and Aurobinumia, literally inheritance taker, really is a taker. For more information on nominal inflection, including the full paradigms of the major noun classes, you can consult any of the standard grammars, such as those mentioned in the lecture on sources and resources. Do be aware, though, that while most forms given in most grammars are plausible and systematically predicted, often some of the forms given as illustration for a particular word do not happen to be attested, and grammars don't always mark this. In these lectures, any form which is securely predictable but not actually found will be marked with a following asterisk. Otherwise, for more on gothic word formation, including a good deal of historical information on various derivational processes, Casaretto's 2004 book is an excellent starting point. That is it for this first lecture on gothic nominal morphology. I will leave the iswis in Iswara at Sehwandande. Thank you very much for your attention.
 Hello, I'm Nelson Gehring and I'd like to welcome you to the first of two lectures on Gothic nominal morphology.  In this lecture, I will concentrate on nouns proper, focusing on their stem formation, their arrangement to inflectional classes, and the formation of compounds.  Before diving into all that, I'd like to start out with a general overview of the Gothic nominal system.  Gothic nominal elements include nouns as such, as well as adjectives, demonstratives, or determiners, personal pronouns, interrogative and indefinite pronouns, as well as participle, all of which may be loosely labeled as pronominal elements.  Finally, there are participle which are nominalized verbs. Their name reflects the fact that they participate in both the nominal system and the verbal system, since they inflect as nominals but retain things like verbal arguments.  Gothic nominals inflect for four primary cases, nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative. There is also a vocative as a marginal category.  This never has a distinct ending, but is always equivalent to either the nominative or accusative in form. Nouns also inflect for number, usually either singular or plural.  The personal pronouns also have a special set of dual forms in the first and second persons.  Beyond this, nouns are assigned to one of three gender classes, masculine, feminine, or neuter, and most nominal elements mark gender in their inflection.  Most of these categories will be familiar from other early Indo-European languages, but there is one further distinction which is more distinctive to dramatic.  Adjectives have two sets of endings, one called strong and one called weak. The circumstances under which each set of endings is used will be discussed in the lectures on syntax.  So, if we turn to the nouns as such, the first thing to address is stem formation.  Nouns in Gothic belong to one of a number of distinct inflectional classes, each with its own patterns for marking case and number.  The traditional terminology for these classes is a little bit variable. Most commonly, each inflectional class is called a stem class, with a label like A stem, O stem, N stem, etc.  Germanicists will sometimes use a slightly less precise labeling grouping together, at least A and O stems, and sometimes all vocaliic stems as strong nouns and N stems as weak nouns.  I will avoid doing this in these lectures and stick to the traditional stem class morphology.  That said, even calling these stem classes is probably a little bit anachronistic for Gothic.  It implies a morphological structure where a nominal base is regularly suffixed by a stem-formant, stem suffix, to which an inflectional suffix is added on top of it.  In a few cases, the sort of decomposition does seem possible with Gothic nouns synchronically.  So, for example, in the dative plural, we could in fact speak of A, O, I, and U stem-stem vowels, A, O, I, U, each of which is then followed by a single dative plural suffix, M.  But more often, this stem plus ending structure is no longer synchronically present in Gothic, and the nominative singular of these nouns, of the ones mentioned so far, only Sunus, with its U vowel, actually has a distinct stem vowel on the surface.  For DAX, THEUDA, and GANTS, the historical stem and ending have fused into a single element.  In other words, the synchronic grammar of Gothic typically involves just a root or base plus an inflectional ending.  As we will see shortly, there are still some optional stem-forming suffixes available, but the role is much more restricted than in proto-Germanic.  This ending is often a single segment which conveys all the inflectional information about case and number, and to some extent about gender.  I will continue to use the traditional terminology going forward, but you should understand that an A stem noun does not really have an A in its stem, or really indeed any special stem suffix at all.  So, with some of the general background out of the way, let's take a look at the major noun classes of Gothic.  There are four broad classes of historical, vocallic stem nouns.  One of the largest categories by far is the A stem nouns. These may be either masculine, like DAX, or neuter, like WORD.  We'll look at how gender inflects the inflection of the A stem subclasses shortly.  For now, note that in addition to gender, there is also an important subclass of A stems formed by adding a palatal glide suffix.  Because of Zephyr's law discussed in the lectures on Gothic phonology, the weight of the stem affects the surface forms of the inflection, so we have light yaw stems like masculine nithius and heavy yaw stems like masculine heredys.  They're also neuter equivalents of both.  Another very major noun class in Gothic are the O stem nouns.  These, such as the other people, also have an important subclass formed with a palatal glide, and these are again subdivided into two classes by weight, like yaw stems and heavy yaw stems.  We'll take a look at these shortly. All O stems and subtypes are feminine.  The third vocallic stem class are the I stems. They're a bit less numerous than the other stem types mentioned so far, but still very important.  The masculine I stems are only distinct from the A stems in the plural, but the feminine I stems have a special inflection throughout most of the paradigm, and there are several very productive feminine I stem derivational suffixes in Gothic.  You can see a couple examples here on the slide. These mostly form abstract nouns to verbal and adjectival bases.  Finally, at least as far as the adjectivals, the vocallic stems go, there are the U stems.  The count of native Gothic words belonging to this class is pretty restricted.  There's only one neuter, a handful of feminines, and a modest number of masculine.  This includes two derivational suffixes, asus and odus, both of which are masculine specifically.  A good number of non-Gothic names also inflect at least partly as U stems.  So, if we turn from the vocallic stems to the consonant stems, the only really large class in Gothic are the N stems.  These can potentially be of any gender, but the neuters are really pretty uncommon.  The masculine show just one N stem inflectional type.  There are however two parallel classes of feminine N stems.  One has an O formant throughout the paradigm, and the other has a long I, E formant throughout the paradigm.  These are called the OWN stems and the IN stems respectively.  The IN stems are the more marked of the two options, and they're almost all abstract nouns derived from adjectives.  So, from an adjective like LUNX, we have an abstract noun, LANGI length.  The most frequently occurring word of the IN stem class, MANAGI, was probably also originally abstract noun as well to the adjective MANAX, many.  But it usually has a concrete reference now to a physical multitude or a crowd.  Like the O stems, we also find the N stems extended with an additional palatal glide suffix.  So, we have N stems like GUDIA or ECLEISIO.  The masculine YON stems in particular often form derivatives to other nouns, especially agent nouns of various types.  So, GUDIA is derived from the A stem noun GUTH, GOD, and derivationally means basically a God person, someone who does the God thing, literally priest.  Other than the N stems, the classes of consonant stems are all fairly small, although some of them contain some high frequency leximes.  The R stems are entirely restricted to kinship terms.  Here, it's probably worth pointing out that the cognates of FATHER and MOTHER, which are so widespread across the Indo-European family, have been replaced by ATTA and ATHE, respectively.  FATHER is attested but only once in evocative use, and the hypothetical MODAR MOTHER is completely unattested in Gothic.  Beyond the R stems, there is a class that's called the ND stem nouns. These are all D-verbal and form agent nouns.  It's not a very large class, but it contains several important leximes, such as NACIANCE SAVIOR, as well as FIONCE ENEMY, and FRIONCE FRIEND.  For the rest of the consonants nouns, I'll just refer you to any of the standard grammars.  These are often extremely interesting nouns from the standpoint of historical grammar, but are a bit too irregular and heterogeneous to cover fully in this lecture.  Gothic, of course, also has its share of genuinely irregular nouns, which are also often very interesting from a historical perspective.  One particularly common one is a MANNA, a human, a person, a mortal, which partly inflects as an N stem noun, but partly as a consonant stem noun.  One question that I've been skirting around a little bit in this lecture is just what I mean by a subclass.  By and large, I've ignored minor variations in inflection that stem from simple morphophonemic processes, such as the deletion of final S in certain environments.  You can see the third lecture on Gothic phonology for details on morphophonemics.  But in cases where the surface variation is a little more drastic, it's not quite clear to what extent the variations are morphophonemic versus strictly morphological,  and the answer will, of course, depend to some extent on our linguistic framework.  We can see some of the difficulties by looking at one of the cases of the yod stems, with the form of the palatal glide, the feminine yod stems.  Descriptively, the tradition calls these a single larger class of o-stems with two subclasses, light yod stems and heavy yod stems.  And if we look at the paradigms involved, we can see that for the light yod stems, this is entirely unproblematic.  There aren't even any minor alternations going on.  We just have the presence of a glide before the normal o-stem endings.  So if we have theuda, we have parallel to that sun-ya same ending with a palatal glide inserted before that, and you can see that it goes for the same rest of the cases all the way down.  With the heavy stems, things are just a little bit more complicated.  In most forms, the analysis is transparently the same.  We just have a glide inserted before the ending.  So in the genitive, we would have theudos in the plain o-stems and bandios in the heavy yod stems with the palatal glide inserted before the ending.  But in the nominative singular, the alternation is not entirely predictable.  We might expect band-ya on systematic grounds, the same ending as in theuda with the glide inserted, but instead we just have band-i.  This i can safely be regarded as a syllabified palatal glide, but we're left with a null ending.  That is, when compared to the other plain o-stems and the light yod stems, rather anomalous.  Note that it's not just a matter of a different ending, but that there's a different pattern since the heavy yod stems show distinct nominative and accusative forms, band-i versus band-ya.  While the other two stem types have a syncretism in the nominative and accusative forms.  Diachronically, the explanation for this stretches back to Indo-European and the up-lout of i-h2 stems, but the synchronic status of this ending is really not entirely clear.  It would certainly seem unwarranted to separate the heavy yod stems from the plain o-stems when so many forms are obviously parallel,  but the strange nominative singular is difficult to derive through any recognized morphophonemic process in Gothic.  We probably need at least a little strictly morphological marking of this subclass to make things work out.  While I've mostly focused on inflectional classes, I should spend a brief moment on compounding in Gothic,  which is an important and probably productive feature of the grammar.  Both compound nouns and adjectives are reasonably common, and formally, compounds very often show a linking vowel between the two elements.  The most common connecting vowel is a, which was the historical stem vowel of the a-stems, and a reduced form of the stem vowel of the o-stems.  This a is also used when the first element is a plain n-stem.  In the yaw-stems, we can see a weight-based alternation. The light yaw-stem simply preserves both the glide and the linking vowel as an al-ya.  While the heavy stems syncopate the a, leaving the glide alone, now vocalized to an i as an ar-vi-num-ya, a heavy yaw-stem.  In the a- and the u-stems, we usually see their historical stem vowel as the composition vowel,  so an i-stem, nor the, and a u-stem for the.  In a few a-stems, such as Guthus, Temple, literally Godhouse, the linking vowel has been dropped, so Guth is an a-stem noun.  There may have been competing pressures, especially on the a-stems. On the one hand, a linking vowel was useful and helped avoid potentially awkward combinations and junctures.  On the other, the stem vowel is no longer synchronically present in the a-stems, and there may have been some pressure to have the first elements of compounds align more superficially with the independent form of the noun.  Forms aside, semantically gothic compounds can show a range of relationships between the two elements, but as a general rule, the compounds as a whole strongly tend to be endocentric.  Fingraguth, finger gold, really is a type of gold, and Aurobinumia, literally inheritance taker, really is a taker.  For more information on nominal inflection, including the full paradigms of the major noun classes, you can consult any of the standard grammars, such as those mentioned in the lecture on sources and resources.  Do be aware, though, that while most forms given in most grammars are plausible and systematically predicted, often some of the forms given as illustration for a particular word do not happen to be attested, and grammars don't always mark this.  In these lectures, any form which is securely predictable but not actually found will be marked with a following asterisk.  Otherwise, for more on gothic word formation, including a good deal of historical information on various derivational processes, Casaretto's 2004 book is an excellent starting point.  That is it for this first lecture on gothic nominal morphology.  I will leave the iswis in Iswara at Sehwandande. Thank you very much for your attention.
Gothic_3_0_1403.png Gothic_3_1404_2627.png Gothic_3_2628_10319.png Gothic_3_10320_10427.png Gothic_3_10428_10787.png Gothic_3_10788_11291.png Gothic_3_11292_11543.png Gothic_3_11544_12659.png Gothic_3_12660_12779.png Gothic_3_12780_12863.png Gothic_3_12864_13547.png Gothic_3_13548_14471.png Gothic_3_14472_15035.png Gothic_3_15036_15287.png Gothic_3_15288_15695.png Gothic_3_15696_16271.png Gothic_3_16272_16463.png Gothic_3_16464_22290.png