Gothic language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:59, 8 December 2006

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Gothic preserves many archaic Indo-European features that are not always present in modern Germanic languages, in particular the rich Indo-European [[declension]] system. Gothic had [[nominative]], [[accusative]], [[genitive]] and [[dative]] cases, as well as vestiges of a [[vocative case]] that was sometimes identical to the nominative and sometimes to the accusative. The three [[grammatical gender|genders]] of Indo-European were all present, including the neuter gender of modern German and Icelandic and to some extent modern Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, in opposition to the "common gender" (''genus commune'') which applies to both masculine and feminine nouns. Nouns and adjectives were inflected according to one of two [[grammatical number]]s: the singular and the plural.

One of the most striking characteristics of the [[East Germanic languages]] is the division of nouns between those with ''weak declensions'' (generally those where the [[root (linguistics)|root word]] ends in an ''n'') and those with ''strong declensions'' (those whose roots end in a vowel or an inflexional suffix indicative of a pronoun). This separation is particularly important in Gothic. While a noun can only belong to one class of declensions, depending on the end of the root word, some adjectives can be either strongly or weakly declined, depending on their meaning. An adjective employed with a particular meaning and accompanied by a [[deixis|deictic]] article, like the [[demonstrative pronoun]]s ''sa'', ''þata'', or ''so'' which act as definite articles, took a weak declension, while adjectives used with indefinite articles had a strong declension.

This process is still sometimes found in German, where adjectives are declined: