Abstract

This article discusses how the Greek imperative was translated into the Gothic in the Gothic Bible. While the Greek imperative system has three tenses, three voices, two numbers, and two personal forms, the Gothic one has one tense, one voice, three numbers, and three personal forms. Due to these differences, Gothic translator(s) would consider such facts in translating Greek into the Gothic. Through this study, this author found that various Greek tense-forms of imperative were translated into the present tense one in the Gothic and that the Greek imperative mood was sometimes done into the Gothic subjunctive mood that was known to replace the usage of imperative in Gothic. In addition, there are a few examples that the Greek imperative was translated into several vocabularies in Gothic Bible (e.g., 35-38) or substituted by diverse expressions such as the participle (e.g., 39) and an idiom (e.g., 50), and an interpreting translation (e.g., 51). Those examples show that the Gothic Bible was not a simple literal translation but one according to the system of the Gothic language still even if it was faithful to the original language.

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