Certain words have a tendency to change their meaning on a regular basis. These include the words “nice”, “silly” and “gay”. Interestingly these three words also tend to overlap in meaning. “Nice” in its earliest form meant “ignorant”, “silly” meant “blessed” at an early stage and “gay” has recently shifted to mean “lame” in the pejorative sense. Even the word “blessed” has shifted to mean “silly” in the contemporary sense. Another set of words like this, but rather distant from that triad in sense, is “Goth”, “Gothic” and the like.
Starting with proto-Indo-European, the stem “jhew-” meant “pour” and gave rise to the Greek “chyme”, which describes the fluid food becomes while it’s being digested. A D was added to this, making “jhewd-“, also meaning “pour” although presumably it was inflected or altered to a slightly different meaning. This became “hundo” in proto-Italic, meaning “I pour”, which became “fundo” in Latin, possibly due to another form. In Proto-Germanic, this word became “geutanã” (I can’t find the “a” with a hook underneath it), meaning “(to) pour” (there are two infinitives in English but not in many other Germanic languages), ultimately leading to the English “gut” and “ingot”, and related to the Proto-Germanic “Gautaz”, a mythical figure whose name means “he who pours out libations” and is connected to the word “God”. Some Germanic tribes have mythical founding figures. If you trace the Anglo-Saxon monarchs far enough back, you get to Woden, who is alleged to be Hengest’s great-great grandfather, meaning that the current King seems to be able to trace his ancestry back to a pagan god.
The Goths seem to be named after such a mythical figure, and the word Goth tended to float around the Germanic people, giving its name to Gothenburg, the Gutnish dialect or language, the Geats mentioned in ‘Beowulf’ and the Jutes who settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight and were later massacred. The Goths themselves were a Germanic people like the Vandals, Norse, Angles, Saxons, Alans, Burgundians and Franks, but unlike them they fell upon such hard times that they were eventually completely lost. They called themselves (that phrase will become important) the “Gutþiuda”, which was also their land’s name. They crossed the Baltic and settled along the Vistula. Wulfila, whose name means “wolf cub” or “wolflet”, evangelised them in the fourth Christian century and converted them to Arian (not Aryan) Christianity, which includes the heretical belief that Christ was created and hadn’t existed ab aeterno. This led to the printing, and yes it was printed though with separate stamps, of the Codex Argenteus, a Gothic gloss of the Bible, which is the main source for the Gothic language today. All that said, their chief claim to fame was when the first king of the Visigoths Alaric I and his army reached the gates of Rome, at which point it’s famously been said that the people inside the city spoke a language with fewer inflections than the people outside it. This is probably true. It’s also tempting to believe that the fall of Rome was caused by the decay of the Latin language, with the existence of a more fusional language as spoken by the Visigoths somehow leading to a military advantage. Perhaps they were able to think more quickly than the Romans, or their conversations about strategy were faster because of it? I don’t take this idea seriously at all but I kind of wish it were true. It makes the idea of prescriptive grammar, that is, the notion that correct usage ought to be a certain way such as having no double negatives, saying “should have” rather than “should of”, or not overusing the word “like”, seem more valid. There is an argument, which I think doesn’t work at all in most cases, that that kind of grammar promotes clear and rational thought. All of this is rubbish, probably.
The actual reason Rome fell, according to Edward Gibbon, was that the Empire’s adoption of Christianity led to people focussing on the hereafter rather than trying to keep it going. If that’s true, it suggests that the Goths, being Arian Christians, were not so affected by it. In that case, is there some implication of the idea that Christ was “begotten and made” as opposed to “begotten, not made”, which would’ve led to them behaving differently. Another hypothesis is that the horseshoe was invented and made their exploitation of horses more efficient, and that actually might make sense even with the explanation employing the faith, because maybe they’d invented the horseshoe before they became Christian. As far as I can tell, the front runners of hypotheses regarding the fall of the Roman Empire are to do with ecological unsustainability, such as the Empire needing to maintain Rome through pillaging other lands as it conquered them, but I’m no historian. It is notable, though, that Wulfila is said to have refrained from translating the books of Kings in the Bible because he thought it would encourage them to wage war, so maybe they were just more successfully violent and aggressive than the Romans at that point.
This incident is the cause of the first semantic shift in the word “Gothic”, where it refers to the likes of architecture. This is because historians at a later date perceived Roman territory as being taken over by the Goths, and this was indeed somewhat true, with for instance the Visigothic kingdom in the future Spain and the Goths taking control of the Italian peninsula. Hence the distinctive architecture and calligraphy of a particular time during the Middle Ages came to be called “Gothic”. Apparently some early clockwork timepieces are also described in this way. It went on from there to be used to describe a genre of tales set in Gothic buildings, and their aesthetic led in the twentieth century to the youth culture.
The Goths were a large section of Germanic-speaking people who have now completely disappeared along with their language. Although they spread, in two halves, from Portugal to the Crimea, they were ultimately conquered, although there are traces of their language in Italian and Catalan, the word “Catalunya” possibly being a corruption of a word like “Gothland”. Surprisingly, their language seem to have survived in the Crimea into the late seventeenth century CE. They had fallen upon hard times in the later fourth century, being treated harshly by corrupt Roman officials and having to sell their children into slavery in exchange for rotten dog meat. This led to a war, and later a massacre of the Goths by the Romans, so although my knowledge of their history is limited I can certainly see that they may have become very resentful of the way the Romans behaved towards them. I don’t know if this was actually worse than the way they’d behaved towards other nations though.
As I’ve said, the Codex Argenteus is the main large text surviving today. There is also the Skeireins, which seems to be a Gothic translation of a Greek commentary on the Fourth Gospel. Although this is better than a lot of other languages at the time, for instance early Germanic runic inscriptions in the Elder Futhark or Irish Oghams (which are also in Wales incidentally), it isn’t like there’s a huge extensive body of literature as with Ancient Egyptian, the Greeks and the Romans. Consequently there are big gaps in what’s known about Gothic, and to my mind the actual use of the language itself as opposed to what seem to be glosses (word-for-word “translations” from another language), which might therefore obscure many features of its grammar, is lost. However, it hasn’t vanished completely. It’s written mainly in Greek-derived script, like Coptic and Old Church Slavonic, with a few runes used to fill in the missing sounds. Oddly, it actually uses Ψ for Þ even though later Greek employed Θ for the same sound, presumably indicating that in the early fourth century that sound was still an aspirated T in Greek, but this still doesn’t explain why it didn’t adopt the rune, as English and Old Norse did.
Being the earliest Germanic language which is extensively recorded, Gothic is a fair guide to what the ancestor of English, Icelandic and German was actually like. It did have a few idiosyncratic features of its own, such as the initial sound “FL-” as in “flea” becoming “ÞL-“, and it’s the only language I’m aware of which has no separate words for “this” and “that”, but on the whole it preserves an earlier stage of Germanic than is otherwise available. This leads me to an oddity among Germanic which has been largely lost but brings to mind something quite distinctive and odd about European languages generally. Unlike many other languages, European ones, including non-Indo-European ones such as Finnish, are strangely reluctant to repeat words and syllables as a way of conveying meaning.
To illustrate what I mean, I once had a Punjabi student who, instead of saying “is very different”, used to say “differ-differ”. I presume this is a feature of Punjabi, which is an Indo-European language and I believe most closely related to Romani, the language complex of the Roma people, which however like other languages spoken in Europe doesn’t have duplication. In other languages, such as Malay, repeating a noun is used to make it plural, which is like many features of Malay and Indonesian bafflingly logical and makes speakers of other languages wonder why we bother with the kind of grammar we have. It does happen in English, as with “blah-blah”, “boogie-woogie” and “tutu”, but it tends to be quite informal and seems to have no fixed function. Yiddish does it to express contempt of course, and that’s been borrowed into American English. English varies the vowel sometimes, such as with the word “flip-flop”. Afrikaans, which is very close to Dutch indeed, uses it, which is interesting because it isn’t a European language. Outside Europe it’s both very common and has specific grammatical functions.
The ancestral Indo-European language did appear to use reduplication, in particular to express certain inflections of verbs. In Sanskrit, the Class III athematic verbs express the aorist, preterite and the intensive. Where these verbs can be traced to a cognate in Germanic, it’s possible that such a verb would also be reduplicative in our own ancestral language.
Well, Gothic does this! Germanic languages historically have two main types of lexical verb plus some other unusual ones such as the preterite-present classes, though one type has been lost from Afrikaans, Bislama and Tok Pisin. These are the weak and strong verbs. In English, weak verbs generally either add “-ed” or “-t” to form the preterite and the past participle unless there’s a T already at the end, so we have “generated”, “burnt” and “cut”. There are also a few contracted verbs in this class like “have” – “had”. English strong verbs are gradually disappearing, but inflect nowadays by changing the vowel in the stem in the past and often add “-en” with another vowel change in the past participle: “drive” – “drove” – “driven”. Over the history of written English, many verbs have passed from strong to weak, an example from my own lifetime being “thrive”, but a few have gone the other way, such as “dig”. English strong verbs as they are now are, as usual, not as distinctly conjugated as they used to be since the plural preterite used to be like the past participle, and before that was distinct from both it and the singular preterite.
Anglo-Saxon as she was written had seven strong verb classes. There were also dual pronouns, “wit” and “git”, for when there were two of someone, but no third person dual personal pronoun, but the verbs associated with them just used the plural. Gothic was, unsurprisingly, more highly inflected and did conjugate for the dual, something which is incidentally completely absent from Latin. I’ve seen it claimed that in the oldest Germanic, strong verbs were actually the main form of verb with weak verbs a minor feature of the languages, and extrapolating backwards this does seem to make sense but it’s a little hard to believe. The seventh class included the reduplicative verbs, of which there were two types. One changed the stem vowel, the other didn’t. The reduplication happened in the preterite. The verbs included: “haitan” – “hight” and “hey” (this is an interesting one); “laikan” – leap (the cognate is “lake”, meaning “play”); “slepan” – “sleep”; “letan” – leave, let go (cognate “let”); “tekan” – “touch”; “saian” – “sow”; “bnauan” – “rub”; “hahan” – “hang” (transitive only); “bautan” – “beat” (found as a loanword in Portuguese but possibly not in the bits of the Bible which survived); “trauan” – “trust”, believe; “gangan” – “go”, walk.
Leaving Gothic, at least for now, Old Norse also retained a few reduplicative verbs, including “róa” – “row”; “sá” – “sow”. The former was still reduplicative in Old Norse, the preterite being “rera” in the preterite active first person singular (“I rowed”), but the latter had undergone the common change of S or Z to R which occurred in Scandinavian and West Germanic, making the same part of the verb “sera”. This made the “-ra”-type ending and the similar endings for other parts of the preterite more like an ending for a small class of non-reduplicative verbs rather than reduplicative in themselves. That is, although the form of “row” was still reduplicative in form, it wouldn’t’ve seemed like it to the speakers of the language due to “sow” changing.
I’ve gone into these verbs in what is possibly quite tedious detail in order to test an hypothesis I had about them. I thought that reduplicative Germanic verbs tended to refer to repetitive actions, and to an extent I stand by this. Sowing seed, rowing and beating, for example, are clearly that kind of action. Sleeping could also fall into this category if it formerly meant something like snoring, and walking involves stepping forward repeatedly. It doesn’t seem to work for all of them. It is interesting that trusting, i.e. having faith, is in this class because some Christians see commitment to Christ as a one-time thing and others say that the perseverance of the saints is like someone holding onto a rope being saved from drowning, and it could be said that faith waxes and wanes in a cycle and is therefore a repeated rather than continuous action. Hence trusting in the Lord is something one has to do more than once. One of the many peculiar things I do is to say the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic, and if it gives me other insights like this, it’s definitely worthwhile. The others are not so obvious, but there is another distinctive feature which still shows traces in English. One of these is the verb “hang”, which we use in both strong and weak forms: hanged for execution and hung for the more benign action. Hence there is a distinction of some kind here which is unique in English so far as I can remember. The other is the remarkable verb “hight”, which is one of the two last traces of reduplicative verbs in English, and also the only synthetic passive in our language. English passives are almost always in the form “be called”, “be taken” and so forth, but “hight” is a passive in itself, and also looks suspiciously like it would’ve been “hey” in the active present. Hence when we say “hey”, coincidentally or not, we seem to be using the active voice of “hight”. It should actually be “hote”, which was a real English word. Moreover, the “GH” in “hight” descends from the Anglo-Saxon H in “heht”, which is a remnant of the reduplication which produces the likes of “haihait” in Gothic, although the passive is not reduplicative in Gothic and in fact it’s a preterite in English.
The other apparent remnant of such verbs in English is the past tense of “do” – “did”. This, however, is rather obscured by the development of all the weak verbs which use the “-ed” ending in the past, which in fact has been thought by some to be a descendant of an appended “did”, or rather its ancestor, although that idea may have gone out of fashion. If so, it’s a bit like the Old Norse “row” and “sow” extended to the whole weak verb system. Also in that class in Old English are fon – seize, preserved in its past tense as “fang”, which is no longer a verb, and also in the phrase “new-fangled”, and “feallan” – “fall”. These are not repetitive actions. “Hang” actually used to be the past participle “hangen”, the present being “hon”.
In English then, all this is, like the traces of the instrumental case, a tiny island of the way things used to be in the ancestor of our current language, except that this time it doesn’t survive in present day English at all unless you count “did”. “Hight” is no longer used, although Shakespeare did employ it.
All of this, that is the instrumental and the traces of a synthetic passive and reduplication in English, makes me feel like there could be a familiar-sounding version of modern English which nevertheless (remember?) drinks of the ancient font of our tongue in such a way that it’s more reminiscent of the ancient phase of the millennia-long string of parents and children, each of whom could understand each other, stretching back into prehistory, than of how we speak today. After all, we all know what led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, don’t we?
A Box Of Chocolates 