Can you cite a passage or two with 'anastodjan du... ' ?Konungr wrote:1 - du can be omitted, true, but I felt like it could be used there. I'm not sure on the true grammatical purpose of du, but the Bible uses both forms.Lambuzhao wrote:#1 - I do not think you need 'du' there; the simple INF ought to do duty therein.Konungr wrote:
Anaks, sums in bisitandamma razna anastodida du siggwan.
All of a sudden, someone in the house next to ours started singing.
#2 - There are plenty of examples in Wulfilas where the simple verb is used w/o stating "began to", and an ADV like 'anaks' or 'sunsaiw' lending the inchoative/inceptive flavor.
#3 - I am surprised at the choice of 'anastodjan' - why not 'dugann'? There are a number of examples from Wulfilas using dugann + INF ( Mt 11:7, Mt 11:20, Mt 26:74, Mk 1:45, Mk 4:1, Mk 4:20, Mk 4:22, etc).
The only hits I get are things like
du Aifaisiaum anastodeiþ [epistle] to the Ephesians begins
aiwaggeljo þairh Lukan anastodeiþ the gospel of Luke begins
which see-
https://books.google.com/books?id=I5IFC ... BE&f=false
Just because is a heavily-inflected Germanic language, does not mean that Wulfilas was unduly influenced, or even hamstrung, by Greek predecessors. To be sure, there are some vocab liftings and word-choice/idioms that are calques or outright pilferings, but Gothic is a beautiful language with its own special quirks. Nevertheless, anastodjan is pretty much used intransitively3 - Flavour, I guess. We know that the Bible was heavily based on Greek grammar, so it's probably up to us to choose how we want to handle various synonyms and words.
E.g.
Here's where the story begins
while dugann (duginnan) is more often than not transitive,
E.g.
I began the story like this.
I began to tell the story.
Furthermore, duginnan uses verbal (infinitival) predicates, as I cited beforehand.
It's kind of up to us when there's a word that isn't attested, and we have to backhoe to bring forward, but when Wulfilas left us some clear examples (and actually many, in the case of dugann) we're given the option to be creative in other ways.