This Narten thing won't get out of my head now. Questions:
Are Narten presents restricted to athematic verbs?
Are there perfective verbs where Narten shows up?
Are there verbs of a non-CVC structure that are Nartens?
Are IE words like "foot" or "heart" connected to all this somehow?
By the way, I'm still unconvinced that Narten presents are terribly ancient
(not retracable to ProtoSteppe, that is, and therefore created later than
9000 BCE). Now, thinking more about this, I think it's clear that
quantitative ablaut is older than qualitative ablaut. Qualitative ablaut is
late within IE whereas quantitative ablaut seems to go back a fair ways
within the development of IE.
Since Nartens deal with quantitative ablaut, it seems reasonable to view it
also as relatively old but within the sphere of IE evolution - perhaps
caused by a regular and automatic phonological process that caused some guna
forms to become vrddhi BEFORE zero-grade forms were effected by the strong
stress accent by Common IE.
So once Nartens were in place, the new stressed penultimate accent would
erode the original vowel of the stem, making vrddhi become guna and making
guna become zero when unaccented. In all, my suspicion is that the vrddhi is
somehow a guna in disguise. Thoughts? Comments?
- gLeN
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