Gothic Lesson 1 - The Case System and Masculine A-Stems

Hails,

My name is Mike (or Maiks, as we would spell it in Gothic), and I'll be posting some Gothic lessons here. Someday, I hope to expand these and put them into a book, but for now a blog format will get the job done. So on to the language.

One of the first things you will need to learn is the case system. In Gothic, nouns have different endings that tell us what role they fill in a sentence. We have remnants of this case system in our pronouns in modern English. We use 'he' for the subject of a sentence, 'him' for both the direct and indirect object, and 'his' for the possessive. While our normal nouns don't do this, all Gothic nouns do. Additionally, Gothic definite articles (the word for 'the') change too. Let's look at a typical noun: 'wulfs', meaning 'wolf'.


Nominative:      sa wulfs                           þos wulfos          
                        the wolf (subject)              the wolves (subject)
Accusative:       þana wulf                        þans wulfans the wolves
                        the wolf (direct object)      the wolves (direct object)
Genitive:           þis wulfis                        þize wulfe    
                        the wolf's (possessive)      the wolves' (possesive)
Dative:             þamma wulfa                  þaim wulfam
                        the wolf (indirect object)   the wolves (indirect object)

So you can see that the word for 'the' changes along with the noun. By the way, the letter þ is called a thorn and it's pronounced like the 'th' in the word 'thigh', never like 'thy'.

Changing the case endings is called 'declining' a noun. Always remember that verbs conjugate, but nouns decline. Though if say that a noun conjugate, I'll know what you mean. Let's explore how the case system works in an actual sentence. Some quick vocab: hunds means dog, or hound. Bitiþ means 'bites'.


Sa wulfs bitiþ þana hund.
The wolf bites the hound.          

The -s tells us that wulf- is in the nominative case and is the doer of the verb. The wolf is the one who bites. When we remove the -s from hund-, we put it into the accusative case. This means it's the direct object of the verb. The hound is the one being bitten. The forms of the definite article tell us the same thing, and have to be in the same case as their nouns. We can reverse the word order and have the same meaning, because it's the case system that tells us who bites whom. 

Þana hund bitiþ sa wulfs.
The wolf bites the hound.

To make it so that the hound is the one who bites the wolf, we have to put hund- into the nominative case and wulf- into the accusative. 


Sa hunds bitiþ þana wulf. OR Þana wulf bitiþ sa hunds.
The hound bites the wolf.  

Now let's look at the genitive case. The genitive case works very much like -'s, or like 'of'. We'll use the word 'þiudans', which means 'king'.

Sa hunds þis þiudanis.
The hound of the king.  

Þis þiudanis hunds.
The king's hound.  

Sa wulfs bitiþ þans hundans þize þiudane.
The wolf bites the hounds of the kings. (Note the plurals).

The dative case covers all sorts of other functions, like indirect object, location, and the means by which things happen. For now, we'll use it to mark a location where things happen using ana, meaning 'on' or 'upon'. We'll also use the word stains, which means 'stone'. 


Sa wulfs bitiþ þana hund ana þamma staina. 
The wolf bites the hound on the stone. 

Þis wulfis þiudans bitiþ stainans ana þaim hundam.
The wolf's king bites stones upon the hounds. (Ok, that made no sense, but the grammatical function of each word in the sentence should be clear.)

Hopefully, you should be getting some idea of how the case system works. If it's not entirely clear, don't worry. You'll have plenty of opportunities to practice declining nouns