Re: Odp: Germanic weak verbs and **do**

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

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2000 3:36 PM

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

[Piotr:] >> ... and many other "basic" verbs, all of them with consonantal stems?

[Glen:] > Piotr, of course they are "consonantal stems". They are athematic (aka lacking a following vowel), hence making them consonant final stems... Looks like you are prone to a some errors too :) Welcome, fellow human. Have a beer!

If you agree that the stems I quoted ARE consonantal (aka athematic), where the heck did I err? Of course I'm as fallible as any other mortal, but I aver I made no mistake here. I'll have a pint all the same, for I love beer. Here's to you, sir.
>>Are they all borrowed?

>Apparently *ei- doesn't look borrowed although, you never know.

[Wiping the froth from my lips (beer head, not rabies):] Glen, *ed-, *ei-, *es- and *gWHen- are among the most securely established IE roots. They occur in most of the branches including Anatolian (all four of them). Maybe YOU wouldn't call *es- a basic verb, but most other people would. All these roots behave very unloanwordly in some respects; e.g. each of them has a large set of derivatives, some of them of a very archaic type (characteristic examples for *ed- are *(@)dont- 'tooth' and heteroclitic *ed-wr/*ed-w(e)n- 'food'; for *ei- we have e.g. *ei-tr/*ei-t(e)n- 'path, road' etc.). They were very much at home in PIE. Frankly, they'd be about the very last lexical items I'd suspect of being borrowed. And there are many more verbs like these; I gave you the first examples that occurred to me but I could add such athematic stems as *kei- 'lie down', *xanh- 'breathe', *ses- 'sleep', *leuk- 'shine', *wes- 'put on (clothes)', *wekW- 'speak', etc., etc., etc. (also *nekWt- 'get dark' supported directly by Hittite and indirectly by the pan-IE word for 'night').

Of course I'll read your theory and tell you what I think of it, but the assumption that the productive thematic pattern is older in PIE is a priori suspect as far as I'm concerned. I wonder how you could ever account for Hittite conjugations. The claim that the thematic vowel is a cliticised 3rd person pronoun generalised throughout the paradigm scarcely sweetens the pill.

>>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?

> You are Satan! Polymorphic verbs?! Now I have to devote another paragraph, sigh. This verb *leikW- has always struck me as odd because of a) its form and b) the nasal infix.

Neither the labiovelar nor the nasal infix are that important here. The same pattern appears with lots of other roots, say *jeug- 'join, yoke, connect', which forms the athematic present *juneg-/*jung-. But even typical thematic verbs like *bhere-ti have athematic counterparts of different types such as the reduplicated *bhi-bher-ti; cf. *gHeue-ti versus *gHi-gHeu-ti (from *gHeu- 'make an offering'. Also the suffix *-n(e)u- produces athematic stems (like *t@... 'becomes tense'). Sometimes we have very simply the same root with or without the thematic vowel, like *teke-ti~*tek-ti 'runs, flows'. Or *leigh-ti~*lighe-ti~*leighe-ti~*linghe-ti~*leigh-je-ti 'licks' (this is what is technically known as polymorphism).
>I explain most of the nonsensical IE stress accent with regular penultimate accent and loss of final vowel. I explain most of the athematic imperfect verbs as being borrowed. [...] Not all athematic verbs are borrowed and sometimes the accent doesn't fall where it should because of later changes after loss of final vowel that regularised a wandering root-only accent to initial (cf. thematic stems like *bhere-). So sue me!

I don't think I will, but so far it looks as if the pattern you seem to see were very far from regular (even with the usual allowance for some residual messiness).
>I guess I should ask, Piotr, "Is there a better theory?"

OK, let me have a closer look at your theory first. You will hear from me (or from my lawyer if I do decide to sue you).

Piotr