[Edit] Accentuation and Intonation

Accentuation in Gothic can be reconstructed through phonetic comparison, Grimm's law and Verner's law. Gothic used a stress accent rather than the pitch accent of proto-Indo-European. It is indicated by the fact that long vowels [eː] and [oː] were shortened and the short vowels [a] and [i] were lost in unstressed syllables.

Just as in other Germanic languages, the free moving Indo-European accent was fixed on the first syllable of simple words. (For example, in modern English, nearly all words that do not have accents on the first syllable--except when they have unaccented prefixes as in "beget" or "forgive"--are borrowed from other languages.) Accents do not shift when words are inflected. In most compound words, the location of the stress depends on its placement in the second part:

• In compounds where the second word is a noun, the accent is on the first syllable of the first word of the compound.

• In compounds where the second word is a verb, the accent falls on the first syllable of the verbal component. Elements prefixed to verbs are otherwise unstressed, except in the context of separable words (words that can be broken in two parts and separated in regular usage, for example, separable verbs in German and Dutch) - in those cases, the prefix is stressed.

Examples: (with comparable words from modern Germanic languages)

• Non-compound words: marka ['marka] "border, borderlands" (English "march" as in the Spanish Marches); aftra ['aftra] "after"; bidjan ['bidjan] "pray" (Dutch, bidden, German bitten, Swedish bedja, English bid).

• Compound words:

  • Noun second element: guda-láus ['guðalaus] "godless".

  • Verb second element: ga-láubjan [ga'lauβjan] "believe" (Dutch geloven, German glauben < Old High German g(i)louben by syncope of the atonic i).

[Edit] Morphology [edit] Nouns

Main article: Gothic declension

Gothic preserves many archaic Indo-European features that are not always present in modern Germanic languages, in particular the rich Indo-European declension system. Gothic had nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases, as well as vestiges of a vocative case that was sometimes identical to the nominative and sometimes to the accusative. The three genders of Indo-European were all present, including the neuter gender of modern German and Icelandic and to some extent modern Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, in opposition to the "common gender" (genus commune) which applies to both masculine and feminine nouns. Nouns and adjectives were inflected according to one of two grammatical numbers: the singular and the plural.

One of the most striking characteristics of the Germanic languages is the division of nouns between those with weak declensions (generally those where the root word ends in an n) and those with strong declensions (those whose roots end in a vowel or an inflexional suffix indicative of a pronoun). This separation is particularly important in Gothic. While a noun can only belong to one class of declensions, depending on the end of the root word, some adjectives can be either strongly or weakly declined, depending on their meaning. An adjective employed with a particular meaning and accompanied by a deictic article, like the demonstrative pronouns sa, þata, or so which act as definite articles, took a weak declension, while adjectives used with indefinite articles had a strong declension.

This process is found in, e.g., German and Swedish, where adjectives are declined not only according to gender and number, but also according to indeterminate/determinate form:

	German	Swedish	English	Gothic
weak declension	der lange Mann	den långe mannen	the long man	sa lagga manna
strong declension	(ein) langer Mann	(en) lång man	(a) long man	ains laggs manna

Descriptive adjectives in Gothic (as well as superlatives ending in -ist and -ost) and the past participle may take either declension. Some pronouns only take the weak declension; for example: sama (English "same"), adjectives like unƕeila ("constantly", from the root ƕeila, "time"; compare to the English "while"), comparative adjectives, and present participles. Others, such as áins ("some"), take only the strong declension.

The table below displays the declension of the Gothic adjective blind (English: "blind") with a weak noun (guma - "man") and a strong one (dags - "day"):

Case	Weak declension					Strong declension
Singular	Noun	Adjective				Noun	Adjective
		root	M.	N.	F.		root	M.	N.	F.
Nom.	guma	blind-	-a	-o	-o	dags	blind-	-s	-ø	-a
Acc.	guman		-an	-o	-on	dag		-ana	-ø	-a
Gen.	gumins		-ins		-ons	dagis		-is		-áizos
Dat.	gumin		-in		-on	daga		-amma		ái
Plural
Nom.	gumans	blind-	-ans	-ona	-ons	dagos	blind-	-ái	-a	-os
Acc.	gumans		-ans	-ona	-ons	dagans		-ans	-a	-os
Gen.	gumane		-ane		-ono	dage		-áize		-áizo
Dat.	gumam		-am		-om	dagam		-áim

This table is, of course, not exhaustive. (There are secondary inflexions, particularly for the strong neuter singular and irregular nouns among other contexts, which are not described here.) An exhaustive table of only the types of endings Gothic took is presented below.

• strong declension :

  • roots ending in -a, -ja, -wa (masculine and neuter): equivalent to the Greek and Latin second declension in ‑us / ‑i and ‑ος / ‑ου;

  • roots ending in -o, -jo and -wo (feminine): equivalent to the Greek and Latin first declension in ‑a / ‑æ and ‑α / ‑ας (‑η / ‑ης);

  • roots ending in -i (masculine and feminine): equivalent to the Greek and Latin third declension in ‑is (acc. ‑im) and ‑ις / ‑εως;

  • roots ending in -u (all three genders) : equivalent to the Latin fourth declension in ‑us / ‑us and the Greek third declension in ‑υς / ‑εως;

• weak declension (all roots ending in -n), equivalent to the Greek and Latin third declension in ‑o / ‑onis and ‑ων / ‑ονος or ‑ην / ‑ενος:

  • roots ending in -an, -jan, -wan (masculine);

  • roots ending in -on and -ein (feminine);

  • roots ending in -n (neuter): equivalent to the Greek and Latin third declension in ‑men / ‑minis and ‑μα / ‑ματος;

• minor declensions : roots ending in -r, en -nd and vestigial endings in other consonants, equivalent to other third declensions in Greek and Latin.

Gothic adjectives follow noun declensions closely - they take same types of inflexion.