Re: Germanic weak verbs and **do**

----- Original Message -----

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 10:47 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: Germanic weak verbs and **do**

Piotr:
>   BTW, compounding dheH with a noun to form a verb was already PIE 
> >practice:
>
>   *kred-dheH- 'entrust, commit, place as a loan' (Latin  cre:do, >OIrish 
>cretim, Skt. srad-dha:-)
>   Skt. na:man-dha:- 'give a name, call'

Erh, beg pardon, sir. I'm not so sure about the use of these examples. The 
first element of these phrases are not verbs. We're witnessing the 
contraction of common IE phrases into single words, not a use of *dheh as a 
modal affix. These are different things. On the other hand, I honestly don't 
know yet the origin of *-dh-...

The use of these examples, sir, is to show that some denominal verbs in IE may derive from compounds involving *dheH-. Since there were other denominal formations, e.g. involving the syffix *-(e)je-, one could easily imagine a scenario in which, say, *nomn-dhe:- and *nomn-(V)je- (with the same or roughly the same meaning) become members of the same paradigm. Since *-je- is also a present-stem forming suffix in PIE, the association of *nomn(V)je- with the present would be natural, while (the aorist of) *nomn-dhe:- would be interpreted as a preterite almost by default.

 

Thus we get Germanic *-(V)j- as the present-tense suffix and *-d- as the preterite suffix. This would account for quite a few subclasses of weak verbs in Germanic.

 

Piotr