The Gothic Genitive Plural in -e

In contrast to the other Germanic languages, Gothic has two endings in the genitive plural: all masculines and neuters have -j (e.g. dagi, wadrd6, gasti, suniwe, attane, hairtani, brWfre); of the feminines, some have -e, some -,5 (e.g. qize, mahte, handiwj, badrge, but biud3, tuggWnr, managein3). The other Germanic languages have only one ending each: OHG OS -o (e.g. tago, dago), OIcel. OE -a (daga). This ending agrees with Gothic -a, from Proto-Germanic -5(n). The Gothic ending -e is unique not only in Germanic but in Indo-European. Until now no satisfactory explanation has been found for this ending, though many scholars have dealt with it. At first it was thought that -e might be derived from an IE -4m as an ablaut-form to -5nm;' but since the form with -j does not appear in any other IE language, this assumption is unlikely. Just as improbable is the suggestion of W. L. van Helten, that long -j received its vowel quality from the genitive singular of the a-stems and that thus a new form of ablaut was created. The possibility that -j5 became -je, so that the ending -e started with the ja-stems,2 cannot be accepted so long as such a vowel change is found nowhere else. Loewe maintained that Gothic -j could be derived from IE -em, which might be a contraction of -e-om;3 but a form that appears only in Gothic can hardly be derived from anything in Indo-European. Brugmann called attention to an important fact overlooked in all these theories, namely that in the i-stems the stem vowel is lacking before -e: we have qtne and mahte, not *qenj and *mahtje; gaste, not *gastj~.4 Brugmann himself saw in the Gothic i-forms a new use of neuter singular nominatives and accusatives of original adjectives ending in *-qo-m, so that barne originally meant 'Kindliches' and qene meant 'Weibliches'. This reconstruction is ingenious, as Jellinek has observed, but like the others it finds no support in the other Germanic languages. Most recently E. H. Sehrt has assumed that Gothic at one time had an instrumental-ablative in -j, which is supposed to have disappeared completely as a case but to be still reflected as a form in the genitive plural in -j.I Unfortunately, Sehrt was not able to prove that such a case actually existed. The endings of the genitive plural in the IE languages seem to have no single origin: Skt. -am, Gk. -W', and Lith. -4 go back to IE -i5m; while Slavic -z, Old

Art · Genitive case · Linguistics · Noun · Plural · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

• A sociolinguistically informed solution to an old historical problem: the Gothic genitive plural

  Open Access•Don Ringe•Transactions of the Philological…•2006

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