GOTHIC LANGUAGE, &o. dual, siu or siju, siuts or sijuts ; plural, sium, siup, sind. Past ind. singular, *, vast, vets; dual, vesu, vesuts ; plural, vesum, vesup, vesun, fec. Nouns have three genders and two num- bers. They have inflections for the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative cases, and a few have also a vocative case, but only in the sin- gular. The stems end either in the vowels a, i, u, or in the consonants n, r, nd, and these terminations determine the modes of the de- clensions. The thematic vowel of the declen- sion in a is distinctly preserved only in the dative singular and the dative and accusative plural, and is lengthened into 6 in the femi- nines. The i of the next declension takes gra- dation, and an a is introduced before it. The declension in u retains the vowel of its theme quite persistently, even before the case sign s of the nominative masculine and feminine, as well as in the nominative neuter, where the other declensions drop it. The n of the theme disappears in the nominative and vocative of the singular. The vowel of the primitive suffix dar, par, or tar (as in fadar, father, ~bropar, brother, dauh tar, daughter, and smstar, sister), is dropped where a case sign is added ; as gen. Iroprs, dat. Iropr. The themes in nd comprise present participles declined as substantives. Adjectives are inflected differently, adopting in about half of the cases the demonstrative pronoun ja, and assimilating with it ; as Jiardus, hard, hardjis, hardjamma, &c. The compara- tive degree is rendered by means of the suffixes is and 6s, which retain their form at the end of adverbs, but are lengthened into izan and ozan at the end of adjectives. The superlative is formed by adding ta or tan to the is or 6s of the comparative ; as froda, clever, comp. masc. and neut. frodozan, fern, frodozein, sup. masc. frodista, fern, frodisto, &c. The per- sonal pronouns are : ik, I ; pu, thou ; is, he ; si, she ; ita, it ; Deis, we ; vit, we two ; jus, you ; eis, they masc. ; ijos, they fern ; ija, they neut. Prepositions govern the genitive, dative, or accusative, and precede the words they gov- ern. Only three interjections have been found : 6, oh ; sai, behold ; vai, woe ! The pronouns %a, so, pata, he who, she who, that which, are used as definite articles. There is no indefinite article. The literary documents in which the Gothic language has been preserved consist of a few manuscripts. The Argenteus Codex, now in the library of the university of Upsal, written in silver and partly gold letters, is a purple parchment, supposed to date from about the beginning of the 6th century, at the time of the rule of the Ostrogoths in Italy. (See ARGEN- TEUS CODEX.) It comprised originally 330 sheets, with Ulfilas's translation of the gospels of Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark, in this order; but only 177 sheets have been pre- served. (See ULFILAS.) The Codex Carolines is a rescript, like all codices except the pre- ceding, and is owned by the Wolfenbuttel library. It was discovered in 1756, and is also supposed to be of Italian origin. It con- GOTHS 125 tains about 42 verses of the llth to the 15th chapter of the epistle to the Romans. The five Codices Ambrosiani form part of the Ambro- sian library in Milan, and contain fragments of the Pauline epistles, of the gospels of Mat- thew and John, of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and a calendar. They were dis- covered in 1817 at the convent of Bobbio in Italy. There is a parchment manuscript in Vienna dating from the 9th century, which contains a Runic and several Gothic alphabets, with a few words and numerical notations. Naples and Arezzo have each a Gothic certifi- cate of sale written on papyrus. Another manuscript was discovered in 1866 by Franz Pfeiffer. It has received the appellation of Codex Turinensis, and consists of four sheets which had been used as the cover of a book or manuscript, and which contain fragments of the epistles to the Colossians and Galatians. Von der Gabelentz published an account of it in the Germania of 1867, and pronounced them illegible. In the following year, however, a translation by Massmann appeared in the same periodical. A complete edition of the literary monuments of the Gothic language has been published in Leipsic by Von der Gabelentz and Lobe (1836-'42), and another in Stuttgart by Massmann (1856-'7). Andreas Uppstrom has caused an exact reprint to be made of every line of Gothic manuscript extant. He pub- lished in this manner in 1854 the Codex Argenteus, and in 1861 the Codex Carolinus and some of the Ambrosian fragments. He died in 1865, and his son published in 1868, from his posthumous papers, the remaining documents. Since the texts could thus be criti- cally studied, the Gothic grammars and vocabu- laries have been considerably changed. The latest researches are embodied in the 5th edi- tion of Stamm's Uljilas, oder die uns erhalte- nen Denkmaler der gothischen Sprache : Text, Worterbuch und Grammatik, which has been revised by Moritz Heine (Paderborn, 1872). GOTHLAND. See GOTTLAND. GOTHS (Lat. Gothones, Guttones, &c.), an ex- tinct Germanic race, first mentioned as dwell- ing on the coasts of the Baltic during the 4th century B. C., and disappearing from history in the 8th century A. D. Their origin has not been ascertained. Pytheas of Massilia is the first who makes mention of them ; he found them at the side of the Teutons in the southern por- tion of the Baltic region. Pliny, in the 1st century A. D., and Ptolemy, in the 2d, place them in the same territory. The name of Getse given to them by later historians does not prop- erly belong to the Gothic race, though Grimm's hypothesis connects the Getaa with the Goths. Cassiodorus, the principal minister of Theodoric the Great, wrote a history of the Goths, which chronicles their migrations and wanderings from regions beyond the Baltic. Procopins speaks of Goths, Vandals, and Gepidae as one people in all respects, and describes them as of fair complexion, with reddish yellow hair and
