Re: [tied] Re: bake

----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2003 3:22 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: bake



> > > Where do you see any Gmc **be:k- "bake"?

> > It seems to have been an *o-present, cf. Gk. pHo:go: . The short vocalism of the present tense in Germanic looks secondary;

> But from where?

There are a number of possibilities. It seems Germanic lumped together a multifarious lot of old *o-presents in this class of strong verbs (there are about 30 of them in Old English alone), imposing the "short/long/long/short" ablaut pattern on all of them. In some cases the present tense simply had short *o in its base form to begin with, as in wash < *wask- < *wod-sk-, in others, a short ablaut alternant may have been generalised, e.g. *bHoh1g-(sg.)/*bH&h1g-(pl.) > *bo:k-/*bak- > *bak- across the board in the present tense, consistent with the type represented by the inherited sg. forms of *far-, *wask-, *grab-, etc.

> In that case of cause the long vowel of Sw. [ba:k-] is tertiary(?), but that verb (as in Danish) is regular. Perhaps:

It would be "tertiary" if it had been introduced during another wave of morphological levelling-out. Many things in many languages are "secondary" and "tertiary" in that sense, and little wonder, since analogical change is as old as human speech. But this particular length is not morphological. In Late Old Swedish stressed vowels were regularly lengthened before a single consonant.

> 1) most linguist have proceeded from the German 'backen'?

Certainly not. ModE bake, for example, can _only_ go back to PGmc. *bak-an-. _Any_ other root vowel would have given a different modern reflex. German and Dutch forms only show that the verb had an alternative present tense with the *-n- suffix (*bH&g-n- > *bakk-) -- a very common phenomenon.

> 2) in some (not ON) Gmc. languages vowels in open syllables are
> automatically long, but some linguists tend to ignore that?

No. But since we know when the lengthening took place, we don't project it back onto PGmc. For example, the long tense vowel or diphthong in ModE bake /beIk/ derives from ME /a:/ produced by such a lengthening. The lengthening, however, can't be pre-Middle English, since OE /a:/ would have given ME /O:/ and ModE /oU/. We get the latter in <comb> from OE ca:mb < camb (OE lengthening before a voiced homorganic cluster). OE bacan certainly had a short vowel.

> > *bHeh1- 'bake, warm' (without the extension) is visible in OHG
> ba:en <
> > *be:-j-an- (< *bHeh1-je-).
>
> Unless that is umlauted *ba:- ?

What *ba:-? The root was already *ba:- in Old High German, and OHG a: < PGmc. *e: (Pre-Gmc. *a: would have rendered PGmc. *o:). There was no umlaut involved; nor could there have been, since only /a/ was umlautable in OHG.

> I'd hate to miss an opportunity to
> unite 'pho:gein' "roast" (ie. "prepare food") and 'phagein' "eat".
> And behind it I sense the *bH-h2- "appear, make appear" root, plus an
> extension -g- that I suspect creates nomina agentis.

There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. Does <pHago:> derive from a nomen agentis?? Denominal verbs don't look like that in IE.

> Furthermore, I suppose it would be possible to get Lat. 'facio' into
> it, although it's now considered to be from *dHeh1- "put". But does
> the semantics match?

The semantics of <facio> surely matches Germanic *de:-/*do:- 'do, make, perform, put, place, etc., etc.' and Slavic *de^- with the same meanings, both impeccable descendants of *dHeh1-.

Piotr