Practice your Gothic #3: Joh 6:48

Welcome to the third edition of “Practice your Gothic”. The idea of this series is to practice a little bit of Gothic every week.

Today let’s have a look at the Gospel of John, chapter 6, verse 48.

Gothic text and English translation

The Gothic text is:

ik im sa hlaifs libainais.

The English translation in the King James version is:

I am that bread of life.

The New International Version translate the verse as

I am the bread of life.

Let us go through this text word by word.

ik : personal pronoun: I
im : 1st person singlular, present tense of “wisan” = “to be” => I am. This word is so frequent that we should learn the whole conjugation table. You can find it in the Wiktionary Concentrate on indicative present and past tense. Leave out the subjunctive for the moment. We’ll discuss the subjunctive later.
sa : “sa” is the demonstrative pronoun. It is so frequent, that it is worth learning that pattern as well. You will encounter it in practically every Gothic sentence. You can also find that in the Wiktionary.
hlaifs : noun, nominative case. The word means bread. It is closely related to English “loaf” (of bread) and German “Laib”. Please note that the nominative case of many nouns ends with “-s”.
libainais : genitive case of libans, “of life”. Libans is nominative case and ends with -s.

Now that we can understand this Gothic Bible verse, let’s practice the Gothic alphabet:

So much for this week. If you like to have a notification when the next edition of “pracice your Gothic” is out, you can subscribe to my Gothic language newsletter.