The paper deals with the problem of defi nite article in the Gothic Bible. More specifically, it concentrates on the differences and similarities of use between the target language, i.e. Gothic, and the source language, i.e. Greek, with special attention being paid to the case of the article – nominative, genitive, dative or accusative. It is part of a larger endeavor aiming at the analysis of the whole Gothic Bible in this respect. This time the Gospel of John is taken into consideration, following an earlier study which concentrated on the Gospel of Matthew. In the paper it will not only be observed how frequently Gothic omits the definite article in places where Greek uses it in the Gospel of John, but also in what way the cases of the definite article vary in both languages due to their grammatical specificities.

The paper compares the employment of the definite article in the Gothic version of the Gospel of Luke and in its Greek counterpart which served as the basis for the Gothic translation. Although the Gothic text is usually said to be a word-for-word reflection of the Greek text, we demonstrate that just like in the case of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John, which were of concern in our previous studies, there are enormous differences between the two languages especially in the domain of the definite article, not only in terms of amount but also in terms of the cases used – nominative, genitive, dative or accusative.

The acquisition of the definite article by LS/L2 Italian learners represents a very delicate issue, on the one hand, in relation to the mother tongue and other known languages and, on the other, to the range of uses of this part of the discussion (among others, cf. Chini 1995a; Pallotti 1998). The research is exploratory, and the results allow us to examine a sector of applied linguistics and language teaching that is still little investigated (Krámský 2016).