Hello, I'm Nelson Goering, 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 of 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 participles all of which may be loosely labeled as pronominal elements Finally there are participles 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's 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 their 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 Germanisis will sometimes use a slightly less precise labeling grouping together at least a and o stems and sometimes all Vocalic 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 stuff suffixed by a stem formant Stem suffix to which an inflectional suffix is added on top of that in a few cases

The sort of decomposition does seem possible with gothic nouns synchronically so for example In a the dative plural we could in fact speak of a o e and u stem stem vowels 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 singulars of these nouns of the ones mentioned so far or only sunnus With its u vowel actually has a distinct stem vowel on the surface for dax

Theuda and karz 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 vocalic stem nouns One of the largest categories by far is the a stem nouns. These may be either masculine like Dax or

neuter like Ward We'll look at how gender inflex 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 ya stems like masculine nithias and heavy ya stems like masculine herdis They're also neuter equivalents of both Another very major noun class in gothic are the o stem nouns

These Such as theotha people these also have an important subclass formed with a palatal glide And these are again subdivided into two classes by weight light yo stems and heavy yo stems I will take a look at these shortly. All o stems and subtypes are feminine The third vocalic stem class are the I stems

They're a bit less numerous than the other stem types mentioned so far It's 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 adjectival or the vocalic 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 othus 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 vocalic stems to the consonant stems The only really large class in gothic are the the n stems these can potentially be of any gender

But the neuters are really pretty uncommon the masculine's 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 ie formant throughout the paradigm These are called the own stems and the in stems respectively

The in stems are the maybe the more marked of the two options and they're almost all abstract nouns Derived from adjectives. So from an adjective like lance, we have an abstract noun Langy length The most frequently occurring word of the in stem class manegi 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 and o stems. We also find the n stems extended with an additional palatal glide suffix So we have n stems like guðia or ekklesio

The masculine jan stems in particular often form derivatives to other nouns especially agent nouns of various types so guðia 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 lexemes 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 into European family

Have been replaced by Atta and a the respectively father is attested But only once in evocative use and the hypothetical modar mother is completely unattested in kothic 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 lexemes such as Nasian's savior as well as fiance enemy and frion's friend For the rest of the consonantals 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 mana 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 and inflection that stem from simple morph of anemic processes such as the deletion of final s in certain environments You can see the third lecture on gothic phonology for details on morph of anemics But in cases where the surface variation is a little more drastic

It's not quite clear to what extent the variations are morph of anemic 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 the one of the cases of the Yod stems with the form of the palatal glide the feminine yo stems

Descriptively the tradition calls these a single larger class of o stems with two subclasses Light yo stems and heavy yo stems and if we look at the paradigms involved we can see that for the light yo 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 theo da We have parallel to that soon. Yeah 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 a few those in the plain o stems and bond Yo's in the heavy yo stems with that palatal glide inserted before the ending But in the nominative singular and the alternation is not entirely predictable

We might expect bond. Yeah on systematic grounds the same ending as in few that with the glide inserted But instead we just have bond II 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 yo 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 yo stems show distinct nominative and accusative forms bond II versus bond. Yeah 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 oplout of ih2 stems But the synchronic status of this ending is really not entirely clear It would certainly seem unwarranted to separate the heavy o 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 morpho phonemic process in gothic

We probably need at least a little strictly morphological marking of the subclass to make things work out Well, 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 end stem and the ya stems We can see a weight based alternation. The light ya stems simply preserve 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 e as an

Arvi numya a heavy yan stem In the i and the u stems we usually see their historical stem vowel as the composition vowel So an i stem no the and a u stem for to

In a few a stems such as guthus Temple literally God house. The linking vowel has been dropped. So guth is a 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 ball was no longer synchronically present in the a stems

And there may have been some pressure to have the first elements of compounds aligned 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

Fingra guth finger gold really is a type of gold and our binumia inheritor literally inheritance taker really is a taker For more information on nominal inflection including the full paradigms of many 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. Awi liudha isvis in Iswara at Sehuandande. Thank you very much for your attention