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Article published In:
Advances in Gothic Philology and Linguistics
Edited by Alexandra Holsting and Hans Frede Nielsen †
[NOWELE 71:2] 2018
► pp. 184–222

The phonology and morphology of foreign words in Gothic revisited

Some observations and remarks

| University of Iceland

The present paper focuses on foreign names and loan words in the Gothic text corpus. The names are mostly Hebrew in origin but were transferred to Gothic through Greek. Their phonetic, phonological and graphemic adaption will be discussed in light of the close connection between the Wulfilian and Greek alphabets. In addition, we will raise the question and discuss whether some names are not fully adapted to the Gothic inflection but remain Greek in form, as well as why foreign words are sometimes not assigned to the inflectional class which would appear to be the most natural one.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Some observations concerning Gothic vowels
    • 1.1Wulfila’s letter ‹u›
    • 1.2Some cases of fluctuation u ~ au
    • 1.3The vowel of the nominative singular of the u-stems
    • 1.4The front vowels: Wulfila’s graphemes ‹i›, ‹e› and ‹ei›
    • 1.5Deviant transliterations
    • 1.6Normalisation
  • 2.Vowels and semivowels
    • 2.1Gothic ‹i› and ‹j›
    • 2.2Gothic ‹u› and ‹w›
  • 3.Consonants of foreign words in Gothic
  • 4.The inflection of foreign words in Gothic
    • 4.1Some observations
    • 4.2The a-stems
    • 4.3The ja-stems
    • 4.4The i-stems
    • 4.5The ō-stems
    • 4.6The jō-stems
    • 4.7The u-stems
    • 4.8The an-stems
    • 4.9The ōn-stems
    • 4.10The blend of Greek first declension and Gothic ein- and i-stems
    • 4.11The “Greek” declension
    • 4.12The root declension
    • 4.13The indeclinables
    • 4.14The mixed declension
    • 4.15Words resulting from word formation
      • 4.15.1Derived nouns
      • 4.15.2Compound nouns
      • 4.15.3Adjectives and adverbs
      • 4.15.4Verbs
    • 4.16Hebraisms
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 21 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/nowele.00012.sna
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