Re: Germanic weak verbs and **do**

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

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, March 17, 2000 9:40 PM

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

Oy veh, I KNOW already. Enough with the thematic *-e/o- lecture. :P
If you bothered to visit my site (boohoo, sob), you'd notice that I also 
explain the thematic vowel as being an archaic 3rd person in *-e that had 
generalized throughout the conjugation before the 3rd person became *-e-to 
(later *-et due to loss of final vowel). The irregular non-thematic verbs 
such as *weid- "to know" or *ed- "to eat", I conclude, must be verbs 
borrowed after this generalization.

---

Glen,

 

Do read up on IE morphology before you apply finishing touches to your deeper reconstruction: *weid- is athematic when conjugated as a perfect: *woid-xa, *woid-txa, *woid-e (here *-e is a 3rd person ending, not a thematic vowel), *wid-me- etc. in the plural; but then ALL such IE perfects are athematic! The only irregular thing about the perfect of *w(o)id- in non-Anatolian IE is that it isn't reduplicated.

 

Do you seriously believe *ed- is a loanword? Where from? And what about *es- 'to be', *ei- 'to go', *gWHen- 'to slay', *dHeh- 'to put', and many other "basic" verbs, all of them with consonantal stems? Are they all borrowed? What about "polymorphic" verbs, i.e. verbal roots which yield both thematic and athematic formations? Say, *leikW-e-ti 'abandons' versus *linekW-ti with a nasal infix and no thematic vowel? Your handling of innocent IE verbs strikes me as somewhat Procrustean.

 

Piotr