The historical derivation of Gothic aba and its n-stem anomalies

Abstract

The Gothic noun aba generally follows the «-stem declension of that language, but it has certain irregular forms that set it aside from the rest of the «-stems of the same gender. These irregularities have recently led to imaginative ideas about its morphology, but as this paper will show, they simply reflect older regular patterns ousted elsewhere. The morphological history of aba does in any case reveal an archaic formation in the Indo-European languages. Gothic aba is used in Wulfila' s translation of the Bible to translate