Уроки готского
Приступим к изучению готского языка.

Итак,

Introduction to Gothic

by James Marchand

  (Within the lessons, Dr. Marchand's commentary on the text appears in black,   his cultural asides appear in blue,  the Gothic text and vocabulary appear in green,  and  comparative vocabulary from other languages appears in purple.)

Gothic: Lesson 1

{in the following, I use v for Gothic o with a dot in the middle (Gothic has no v, so this is good for computer work, easily translated by the computer into the 'Collitz letter', if one wishes to, and y for what you will quickly come to recognize as thorn (Gothic has no y, and th will not do, since th [athaitan] occurs in Gothic).}

So-o-o, we have Matthew 6:1:

Mt 6:1 atsaiviy armaion izwara ni taujan in andwairyja manne du saivan im. aiyyau
laun ni habaiy fram attin izwaramma yamma in himinam.

Picking up our handy KJV (we are at the moment living in England), we read (as if we did not already know it):

Mt 6:1 Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them, otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.

А по русски, соответственно: Смотрите, не творите милостыни вашей пред людьми с тем, чтобы они видели вас: иначе не будет вам награды от Отца вашего Небесного.

Соответственно в переводе:
atsaiviy obviously means 'take heed',
but that helps us little unless our wandering eye runs on saivan at the end of the line.  According to Marchand's Law of the Recurrent Partial (known already in 17th C. England), saiv = 'to see', so that atsaiviy means 'see to it' (= take heed).  We have lots to think about.  If we
are looking at the Greek, we might think prosekhete to be a cognate
(we are Junius, and cognates is our game), we might even begin to equate -ete and -iy, what do we know.

Now we are stuck, but we do notice that izwar seems to be recurrent with another izwar (fourth word from end).  So izwar- means 'your', and the -a and the -amma are endings.  Good -- now armaion means 'alms'. 'See to it alms your', we are cooking with gas.

ni has got to mean 'not', but we can see that this is true by looking at the other ni in the verse, so now taujan means 'to do', probably cognate to German tun. Now we put aside the -an as probably an infinitive ending, but quien sabe?

in must mean 'in', manne looks like 'man' to me, so we have andwairyja left to mean 'presence'.

du saivan = 'to be seen' im 'by them'

aiyyau = otherwise; our ears prick up and we think of 'if though'; we read a lot of Old Dutch, and Old Franconian, even have edited some, so that eddo  'otherwise' is familiar to us.

laun must mean 'reward'; that is what it means in OHG, and it may be that Gothic, like French, writes au for o.

ni habaiy, no problem; we note that that -iy may be the ending for the ye- form of the verb, e.g. 2d pers. pl.

fram attin; we know about att- meaning father, but we go slow here.

izwar we have already dealt with.  We think fram must take the dative, so that the -amma is a dative singular masculine ending (we have an ending at last): Your Father, The One"

in himinam 'in heaven'. We note the -n-, maybe even write himils in the manuscript.

'See to it not to do your alms in the presence of men, otherwise you will not have a reward from your Father, The One in heaven.'

Not bad for a start.  Did I tell you that the words were not separated in Junius' copy?  Bummer.

Go ahead and get ahead of the class if you wish, after all, Junius' friend Marshall did, but don't (DO NOT) look at a Gothic grammar for the nonce -- they will not only confuse you, they will lie to
you.

А вот теперь взгляните на Матфея, глава 6 - на готском: