THE PHILOLOGY OF GOTHIC.*
Tins erudite yet extremely readable book supplies a want long felt by students of the English language. The moat recent de- velopments of our speech have been explained and abundantly illustrated by Mr. Kington Oliphant in his lately published volume. But, as Mr. Douse well says in his preface, "a good knowledge of Gothic is scarcely less valuable to the student of the English language—at any rate of the ancient English or Anglo-Saxon "—than to the student of linguistic science in general, in that upon the phonology, and, indeed, the whole grammar of Anglo-Saxon, " Gothic sheds a flood of light that is not to be got from any other source." We are inclined to go a little further, and to say that any really scientific knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and of modern English must be based upon a study of the morphology of Gothic. It is true, we have Professor Skeet's excellent Gothic text of St. Mark, with a grammatical introduction, and his earlier glossary, also with a short grammar, as well as a variety of German works, such as those of Massmann, Gaugengigl, and Stamm, and later writers. Nor must we forget Dr. Bosworth's most useful cheap edition of the Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Wycliffe and Tyndale's Gospels. But these are rather helps to the acquisition of Gothic than to a scientific study of what we may term the physical and psycho- logical anatomy of the language. The work before us is the first, as far as we know, in which the subject of Gothic has been exhaustively dealt with purely as a branch of philological science. -Upon Mr. Donse's philological acquirements and special faculty for linguistic investigation, we passed a high encomium in reviewing, some ten years ago, his striking essay on Grimm's law, published in 1876. We need here only add. that his powers of lucid exposition and co-ordination of in- numerable facts have increased with the increase of material; and if we miss something of the quaintness of style that characterised his former work, in the volume we are considering we meet with a fuller presentment of the subject, that entails a less concentrated attention on the part of the reader, though an excessive conciseness still occasionally reminds us that brevity of expression is not always true brevity.
No date can be assigned to the dispersal of the Urvolk, as the Germans aptly name the primitive Aryan tribe; bat Mr. Douse believes that it cannot have taken place later than 2000 years B.C. The Greek, Italic, and Celtic offshoots probably saw the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic from ten to eight cen- turies before the Christian era ; but the Teutonic hordes, whose course lay to the North-West, do not appear to have reached the shores of the Baltic at an earlier period than that of the Macedonian Empire. When Tacitns wrote his Germania, some fifty Teutonic tribes occupied the lands lying between the Danube and the Rhine to the South and West, and the Vistula to the North-East ; and along the banks of the lower Vistula and the neighbouring Baltic coast dwelt the Goths. But in the second or third century they began to press down the Valley of the Danube; and somewhat later, Aurelian gave them the frontier province of Dacia. In the succeeding centuries they conquered Italy and Thrace, and founded kingdoms in Ganl and Spain. In the sixth century their power began to decline, and by the close of the eighth they almost disappear from European history. A remnant, however, continued to hold a portion of the Crimea far into the sixteenth century ; and the Flemish traveller Von Thisbe& con- versed with two of their Ambassadors at Constantinople in the year 1562. By some singular chance, the only vestiges of their literature that have come down to us are the fragments of a translation of the Bible, chiefly of the New Testament, made in the fourth century by the Dacian missionary and bishop taffies, who had not a drop, probably, of Teutonic blood in his veins. The Gothic tongue holds nearly the same relation to later Teutonic speech that Sanskrit holds to the Greco-Italic languages ; and of all the German dialects, that spoken by our Anglo-Saxon forefathers has the closest connection with Gothic. Old Norse has a closer connection still, but of old Norse litera- ture no remains date farther back than the end of the eleventh century ; while of the literature of Anglo.Saxon, the begin- • An Introduction, Phonological, Morphological, Syntactic, to Uto Gothic of 171files. By T. Le ltarehruct Douse. London: Taylor sod Francis. 18313.
Mugs are separated from the Gothic of DIfilas by an interval of some two centuries only. A sentence taken from Ulfilas'e version of the Lord's Prayer shows how near in speech we Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century are to the Dacian heathens of the fourth. Wairtliai mum theirs ewe in himinant fah ana airthai; " be.done "—worth, as in "Woe-worth the day "—" will thine so in heaven and on earth."
Dry as the phonology or scientific account of the mere sounds of a language may at first thought appear to be, it will be found far otherwise by those who take the trouble to master the funda- mental principles of this branch of modern philology, of which Mr. Douse gives an admirable summary by way of introduction to the more special portion of his treatise. A striking instance of the success with which there principles may be applied is afforded by Mr. Donse's novel and ingenious explanation of those curious numeral forms, "eleven" and "twelve." The Gothie forms are ainlif and twalif, in oblique case ainlibint and twalibinz. The air and the twa are clear enough, but whence comes the lif ? The usual explanation, first given by Bopp, is that of is the transmogrified lea of Eiss, or dap of the Sanskrit Japan. But why should this dew be replaced by taihun, ten, and teen, except in respect of the numerals intervening between ten and the teens ? The truth is, that lif has nothing to do with lee or dap. In Lithuauian, the numerals eleven to nineteen all end in lika—venttlika, dvylika, &c.—and Mr. Douse shows that the pre-Teutonic base of lif is liqua, and that this liqua is the equivalent of the Latin root tinqu- or ligu-, in Greek aces-sea, connected, again, with the Gothic lam or leihw (pron. " lihw "), which is to Lithuanian lik just what walla (wolf) for wolhwa is to the Lithuanian villca. Hence .5/WV and twalif were originally equivalent to " ' one left, or over,' `two left, or over,' that is, beyond ten."
The morphology of Gothic ie most carefully worked out, and in his treatment of this part of his subject, Mr. Douse gives proof not only of wide learning, but of a singular capacity for lucid dealing with an unwieldy mass of details. But it is impossible, within the limits of a review, to attempt any sort of criticism of this most able and minute dissection of the earliest form of Teutonic speech. Nor, with regard to his essay on the syntax of Gothic, can we do more than refer to the fact that it is wholly original, owing little or nothing to German research (for Stamm's sketch is of the briefest), but based almost entirely upon a patient study of the text of Ulfdas. What space is left us we must reserve for a brief glance at one or two of the principal morphological characteristics of Gothic. The language has a complete inflexional apparatus, and adjectives have a double form of declension, as in German and Scandinavian. Originally, probably, there were eight cases ; but three of these—the loca- tive in the ablative in -ed, and the instrumental in or -d— by Ulfilas's time, had become merged in the dative, which has, consequently, in Gothic a much wider range of function than it possesses in Greek and Latin. Mr. Donee's minute analysis of the verbal stem-forms affords a most interesting view of the evolutionary process by which words change to suit the needs of thought and expression. In the active voice, Gothic verbs have a dual as well as a plural number. They possess the moods of Greek, the optative and subjunctive being combined, but only two tenses, the present-future and preterite, in this respect resembling the languages of the great Semitic and Turanian groups. As in the German and Scandinavian dialects, they are distinguished as strong or weak verbs, according to the form of the preterite. The weak formation is discussed at con- siderable length, and the various theories which have sought to explain it, many of which are not very happy, are subjected to a keen criticism. On the whole, Mr. Douse concludes that the weak preterite is compounded of the verbal stem and an aorist form of the verb " do." In the oldest of the Altaic languages- Japanese—the preterite is formed in almost exactly the same way, the verbs "come" and " do " being used for the purpose either separately or together. The passive has three forms; a preterite passive, compounded of the past participle passive and an auxiliary, and an active inflexional passive (ae in Scan- dinavian), one of the two forms of which, the "correlative passive " derived from the participle, is particularly interesting, as we have in English a survival of it in the word " learn," the life-history of which may be briefly indicated. Starting from a Gothic Ieisan, to know, we have first leisjan, to cause to know, to teach. The latter form becomes in Old Saxon, lerian ; in Anglo-Saxon, lcoran ; in German, lehren. The participial form of leisjan is lisana, whence, through limo» (Gothic correlative passive), we
get linos (Old Saxon), and finally /gentian (Anglo-Saxon), or learn. Loran (teach) became, in time, morphologically merged in learn, which latter word even yet is sometimes used to ex- press the meaning of kerma, Mr. Douse cites the provincial expression, " larn him his letters," and quotes from the Psalms in the Prayer-Book the phrase, " learn [i.e., teach] me under- standing." In German, the distinction between lehren and lehren is still maintained.
Mr. Douse closes his work with a Gothic version of the opening paragraphs of The Pilgrim's Progress, which, with the aid et the notes appended to it the student of Gothic who desires to get at the spirit and genius of this most ancient form of Teutonic speech will do well to master.
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