From: Dennis Poulter
Message: 1824
Date: 2000-03-09
----- Original Message -----From: Piotr GasiorowskiSent: Monday, 06 March, 2000 10:46 PMSubject: [cybalist] Odp: Germanic weak verbs and **do**----- Original Message -----From: Mark OdegardSent: Sunday, March 05, 2000 7:03 PMSubject: [cybalist] Germanic weak verbs and **do**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.
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
I have a quote here from Winfred P. Lehman, Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics (1993).The assumption that such weak tense forms were made by adding auxiliary verbs to bases is a relic of prelinguistic speculation: for example, the proposed explanation by which forms of the PIE root *dheH "place, put" were suffixed to bases of weak verbs (bases that have bever been satisfactorily identified by proponents of the explanation) is still maintained by some scholars today. If we assume that there was some kind of a nominal base, as of the paradigmatic first weak-class verb, Gothic nasjan "save", it is difficult to understand how a meaning "I place saving" could have served as a preterite tense form meaning "I saved". In the same way, the affixed -s of the aorist and future was held to be a redlex of PIE *es "be". Here again the proponents pay little attention to meaning. The meaning conveyed by the verb "to be" after a verbal noun would be totally different from that of the aorist or future. As another argument against the development of preterites and perfects from compound forms, the conclusions of Delbrueck and Brugmann demonstrate that the verbal systems of late PIE and of the early dialects were expanded through affixation of determinatives and suffixes. Compound tenses, as in Latin and the romance languages, and also other late dialects were introduced when the structure of these languages differed considerably from the structure of the proto-language and the early dialects.Lehman would appear to equate the *-dh of the Germanic weak preterite with other derivational verbal suffixes such as *-yo/-eyo, *-sk-,*-s-, as well as the Greek perfect in -k- and the Latin perfect in -w-. So, in the light of what you said, Piotr, is the Slavic perfect a late development like the Latin imperfect, future etc.? Or do you just disagree with this?RegardsDennis