Re: Germanic weak verbs and **do**

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

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2000 2:35 AM

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

Piotr (tu):
>BTW, compounding dheH with a noun to form a verb was already PIE
>practice:

Glen (ege-me):
>Erh, beg pardon, sir. I'm not so sure about the use of these >examples. The
>first element of these phrases are not verbs. [...]

Piotr (tu):
>The use of these examples, sir, is to show that some denominal verbs >in IE
>may derive from compounds involving *dheH-.

You know what? I don't really have any objections to this. I don't know why
I'm being argumentative. That's me :) So I guess this *dheh- would end up
looking like a modal suffix *-dhH- which would then evolve into *-dha- and
thus look like *-dh- with a thematic vowel... Is that right? As I say, I
don't see any precursors to this *-dh- in Steppe since we should find
**-dV... however I don't see it.

>Since there were other denominal formations, e.g. involving the >suffix
>*-(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.

Hmm, according to the EncBritt, there is an affix *-e- (the thematic as in
*bher-e-ti). I live in a world where tenseless IndoAnatolian IE thrives. So,
is this *-ye- present thing a later invention? Do you have examples of this
besides Germanic? Perhaps it was originally nothing more than *-i- with the
thematic *-e-?

- gLeN

---

Of course if you cut it up pedantically into smaller bits, it's a "presentive" suffix *-j- plus the thematic vowel *-e/o- (it's an entirely different question whether such a synchronic analysis reflects the historical origin or *-je/o-!). There are other similar cases, like *-sk-e/o- or *-ej-e/o- (as in causatives). All these suffixes form THEMATIC verb stems, but "thematic" means little more than 'ending in *-e/o-'. IEsts often ignore the internal hyphens.

 

Both *-j-e- and *-sk-e- are common in Anatolian (and everywhere in IE), so they must be regarded as "Indo-Anatolian" under any definition of the term. IA may have been tenseless, but it can't have been aspectless, and expressing aspect is just what such stem-forming suffixes are good at.

 

Piotr

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