From: Mark Odegard
Message: 1814
Date: 2000-03-09
Mark wrote:The way I've read it, the Germanic weak verb was formed by adding a post-positional verbal auxiliary after the bare verb, which in time, fully cliticized. Apparently, this auxiliary verb is the ancestor of English 'do', descended from PIE dhē. (AHD3-Pokorny), dheh1 (EIEC), 'to put', 'to place' (this root is fascinating in its own right).
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.Oh, Piotr [petulent intonation]. Of course I know better. I thought just mentioning the 'citation form' was sufficient. It's "I post-did on 'do'" and not "I post-do on 'do'"
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.As I've thought about this, it's occured to me it's STILL happening in English. Consider 'could have' which sometimes shows up as as the (significantly and fascinatingly) mis-analyzed 'could of', but most commonly as 'coulda'. This is more than just an innovative contraction. In speech, 'have' is on the way to full cliticizing to the modal auxiliaries, and this counts as a post-positional verbal auxiliary, I think.
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?When I posted, I was thinking partly of English, which has stripped the verb down to being almost naked. We're at a point where even -ed could be dropped and replaced with a pre-posed auxiliary. It's the very ease of turning nouns into verbs or adjectives, and back again, that is partially responsible for English's enormous word-stock.I was also thinking of what syntactical and morphological biases the Germanic substratum willed itself, along with vocabulary. The Germanic innovation of verb+did is unique, and I wonder how ancient it is. I wonder if it's more ancient that the first Germanic sound shift. If it does, would this be sufficient to move back the date we're allow to call Germanic Germanic.
Mark.