Changed In Translation: Greek Actives Become Gothic Passives

The paper examines the translation of Greek active voice into Gothic with mediopassive or periphrastic passive. There are 13 such cases, 8 for mediopassive and 5 for periphrastic passive. While the list is rather short, the qualities of the occurrences differ drastically. The periphrastic occurrences turn out to mostly be mistakes, one of which was made by the translator and one ‐ by the scribe, or they are conspicuously close to Latin, which points to a common, but lost Greek source. The mediopassives, on the other hand, demonstrate that the Gothic mediopassive retained enough of its true middle reading to be used for translating some of the Greek unaccusative or intransitive verbs. Another interesting feature is the abundance of the causative suffix in both Greek and Gothic forms in question. The results call for a broader investigation of the strategy utilized by the Gothic translator, for example, analyzing the translations of the Greek media tantums into Gothic.