• Pages
  • Table of Contents
  • About These Lessons
  • The Sounds of Gothic
• Lessons
  • Unit 1
  • Unit 2
  • Unit 3
  • Unit 4
  • Unit 5
  • Unit 6
  • Unit 7
  • Unit 8
  • Unit 9
  • Unit 10
  • Unit 11
  • Unit 12
  • Unit 13
  • Unit 14
  • Unit 15
  • Unit 16
  • Unit 17
  • Unit 18
• Nouns
  • Pure A-Stems
  • Pure A-Stem Plurals
  • Masculine JA-Stems
  • Neuter JA-Stems
  • WA-Stems
  • Feminine Ō-Stems
  • JŌ-Stems; Decl. of Thousand
  • Masculine I-Stems
  • Feminine I-Stems
  • Irregular I-Stems
  • U-Stems
  • N-Stems
  • Minor Declensions
  • Personal Pronouns
  • Reflexive Pronoun
  • WH Pronouns
  • Relative Pronouns
  • Demonstrative Pronouns
  • Posessive Pronouns
  • Indefinite Pronouns
  • Negative Indef. Pronouns
  • Paradigm Tables
• Verbs
  • Present Personal Endings
  • Preterite of Strong Verbs
  • Preterite, Consonant Changes
  • Ablaut Table
  • Principal Parts of Strong Verbs
  • "To Be", Present Tense
  • "To Be", Preterite Tense
  • "To Will", Conjugation
  • Reduplicated Preterites
  • Class I Weak Verbs
  • Irregular Weak Verbs I
  • Class II Weak Verbs
  • Class III Weak Verbs
  • Class IV Weak Verbs
  • Preterite-Presents
  • Auxiliary Verbs
  • Passive Voice
  • Imperative
  • Subjunctive
  • Participles
  • Verbs Governing the Genitive
  • Verbs Governing the Dative
  • Verbs with Feeling
• Adjectives
  • Strong A-Stems
  • Strong JA-Stems
  • Strong WA-Stems
  • Strong I-Stems
  • Cardinals 1 to 10
  • Cardinals Beyond 10
  • Declension of Two and Three
  • Weak Declension
  • Gender of Groups of People
  • Ordinals
  • Comparatives
  • Superlatives
  • Adverbs
  • Adverb Compar. and Superl.
  • Participles
  • Adjectives Governing the Genitive
  • Adjectives Governing the Dative
• Misc
  • Prepositions
  • Conjunctions
  • Questions: Yes/No
  • Questions: WH
  • Cardinals 1 to 10
  • Cardinals Beyond 10
  • Months, Days of Week
  • Colors
  • Other Uses of Accusative
  • Other Uses of Genitive
  • Other Uses of Dative
  • Compound Formations
  • Prefixes
  • Suffixes
• Lexicon
  • Gothic-English
  • English-Gothic
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Unit 7

7.1) Preterite of Wisan

In English we have only two words for the past tense of "to be": was and were. Gothic has more than this.

7.2) Personal Pronouns

Pronouns in English still retain some of the original cases; notice how the pronouns differ in the sentences "I see her" and "she sees me". In fact, one could even say "her see I" and be unambiguous; in Gothic, that word order would not only be completely understandable, it would even sound natural. Here are the Gothic personal pronouns and their English equivalents. Don't let the size of the table scare you, as there is a pattern to them.

English pronouns have merged the accusative case into the dative, while Gothic retains the distinction. English also does not distinguish grammatical gender on third person plural pronouns, but Gothic does. Each set of plurals can refer to groups of all the same grammatical gender, whereas a group of mixed grammatical gender or a group of masculine and feminine beings could use the neuter plural. For groups of people of mixed gender, the neuter plural and masculine plural are both attested.

The pronoun þū also serves a vocative purpose, e.g. atta unsar þū in himinam where Greek uses a definite article instead of a pronoun.

7.3) Simple Reflexive Pronoun

There is a reflexive pronoun for the third person. It does not have a nominative, although it can be found in the lexicon as *seins. Its acc., gen., dat. forms are: sik, seina, sis. First and second person reflexives simply use the personal pronoun, as ik þwaha mik (I wash myself), but in the third person, if the reflexive pronoun refers to the subject of the sentence or clause, sik/seina /sis are used for all numbers and genders.

7.4) Ablaut Table of Strong Verb Classes

Last unit we introduced the verb classes, but without explaining what each class is. The seven classes of strong verb differ primarily in the way their core vowel changes. This change is called ablaut. Here is a table showing the principal parts of representative strong verbs from the first 6 classes, with English equivalents:

7.5) Reduplicated Verbs

Class VII verbs are quite varied; some of them don't use ablaut at all. (Some Gothic language enthusiasts consider them a "mixed bag", but as with most language features there's a pattern to them.) What they do all have in common is reduplication: the preterite of saian is not **sō but saísō. Reduplication was common in Proto-Indo-European verbs and can still be found in Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and the occasional Latin verb, but was lost in most Germanic languages. It is one of the archaic features that Gothic holds over from Proto-Indo-European.

For each Class VII verb, the initial consonant plus the short aí sound occur at the beginning of the stem in all preterite forms:

Class VII verbs that don't use ablaut can have any of several vowels in the stem:

Only the consonant clusters sk, st are reduplicated wholesale in the preterite; all other clusters reduplicate only the first consonant. That is why we find ga-staldan (possess), ga-staístald; skáidan (divide, sever), skaískáþ but fráisan, faífráis.

Here is a table of principal parts for all 7 classes of strong verbs:

The irregular verb gaggan was originally a reduplicated strong verb. Its regular preterite *gaígagg was lost early on and replaced with iddja, which is inflected iddja, iddjēs, iddja; iddjēdu, iddjēduts; iddjēdum, iddjēduþ, iddjēdun.

7.6) Prepositions

The prepositions we've encountered so far have been incidental to the example sentences. A more complete list would include:

7.7) Conjunctions and Clitics

Similarly, Gothic has a wealth of conjunctions; here are just some of them:

The clitics never occur as the first word of a sentence; they are always tacked onto the end of a word. When a clitic is applied to a word that contains a prefix, the clitic goes onto the prefix. If the prefix ends in a voiceless consonant, it becomes voiced:

The clitic -uh and conjunction jah sometimes assimilate to a following consonant, e.g. bidjandansuþ-þan, "but while praying"; jal-liban, "and to live".

Additionally, some conjunctions such as áuk and þan never occur as the first word of a sentence or clause.

7.8) Examples of Material from This Unit

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