From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1791
Date: 2000-03-07
That's wrong, Mark. It was only the preterite and the past participle of such verbs that contained the suffix *-d- often interpreted as an incorporated form of *dh(e)H-. The present-tense stem DID NOT contain it. E.g. Old English lufian 'to love', p. lufode derive from *lubo:-j-o: and *lubo:-d- respectively.
A post-positional verbal auxiliary? This seems strange to me, but then, I am unaware of all the details on how the verbs in other branches of the IE family, past and present, can behave.
A certain case of auxiliary incorporation is the Slavic "perfect" with postposed (e)s- 'be'; and Latin -bam (imperfect), etc. is considered by many to reflect postposed *bhwaH-m 'grow, increase'. Miscellaneous other forms in various IE languages have been analysed similarly.
I also wonder if there is something of the ancient Germanic substratum at work -- not so much in the choice of the verbal auxiliary, but in how it was used. I've always thought that the Germanic innovated vis-a-vis weak verbs as a response to the constraints on new verb formation imposed by the ablaut system. How can you turn a noun into a verb without an easy way to immediately inflect it? The innovation is eminently logical; I wonder why Germanic's sisters didn't think of it themselves.
But they did! And what's more, Germanic causative and denominal verbs were INHERITED formations, even if their past tense was innovated. Th IEs were already perfectly able to make such verbs in a productive way (e.g. *sed- 'sit' could produce *sod-eje-ti 'makes sit; places, plants, sets'), bypassing ablaut problems. Compare the following:Gothic namô 'name' -- namnjan 'to name'Greek ónoma -- onomaínO (< *onom@...:)Hittite laman -- lamnija-What's "new" here?Piotr