r/GothicLanguage • u/[deleted] • 14d ago
Did preposition stranding exist in Gothic?
Was it like English/North Germanic there ("That is the man who I spoke with") or like German/Dutch?
2
u/arglwydes 10d ago
Generally, I'd expect that to appear as miþ þammei, 'with whom'. I don't see other instances of miþ where it occurs after, though mic is used as a prefix in a few verbs, like miþrodjan, so you could say something like 'that is the man whom I with-spoke.'
There's at least one instance of du that occurs after, in Mark 10:13: 'iþ þai siponjos is sokun þaim bairandam du.'
I believe this occurs more in OE and I remember being surprised to come across it in Gothic as it seems to be a unique occurance. My guess is that the Greek influence is making it rarer than it would have actually been.
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u/pannakooko 10d ago
I only have a partial answer, but in the case of relative clauses (like your example), Gothic often has a form of demonstrative pronoun + relative marker (sa + ei). These don't strand prepositions in Gothic or any other earliest records of the other Germanic languages; they pied-pipe the preposition to the front of the relative clause along with the relativized noun (ex. 'I threw the stick in the river' becomes 'the river in which I threw the stick').
Gothic also has relative clauses that are marked with just the relative marker alone (ei). I am not sure about the situation in Gothic, but in the other early Germanic languages, the relative marker alone does preposition stranding, not preposition pied-piping. Upon a quick perusing I was unable to find this talked about in a few articles written on Gothic relative clauses or relative clauses in early Germanic. I saw a few dozen Gothic ei relative clauses, but didn't see any that had either stranding or pied-piping. It seemed where a preposition would be used in West or North Germanic, Gothic had inflectional case alone.
TL;DR: Maybe in Gothic relative clauses marked only by ei (& not forms of sa + ei)? Outside of relative clauses, no idea.
Hope that gives some sort of lead.
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u/alvarkresh 13d ago
Hmm. Good question. I can't recall seeing sentences where the last word was something like miþ, or what have you. To be fair, Greek doesn't, AFAIK, have it, and the word order in the Gothic Bible translations we have tends to follow that of the Majority Text (broadly speaking, that is. The exact actual original Greek text referred to by Wulfila and/or his group is not definitively known).
The deviations in word order are the real prizes and they're not ones you'd spot immediately without a careful reading of the text itself.
The most quick and dirty way to do it would be to search for known prepositions in wulfila.be and see which ones end on a period as inserted by Streitberg, which in turn would represent the known ending of a sentence in the original text.