On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 07:54:22 +0000, ghozzis <
ghozzis@...> wrote:
>Hello!
>I know that "ge-" is similar to latin "co-" and means something
>like "with". But does anyone of you know why in German it is put in
>front of the participe perfect, like in "gelaufen", "gesehen" etc?
Even though my German etymological dictionary explicitly denies it, the
connection of Germanic *ga- with PIE *k^om- as an unstressed Verner variant
is usually accepted. In Dutch, ge- is not prefixed to the perfect ptc. if
the verb already starts with an inseparable preverb (ge- itself, as in
geloven "believe", or be-, er-, her-, ont-, ver-) [the rule in German is
approximately the same, for the preverbs ge-, be-, er-, ent-, ver-, zer-,
emp-, miss-].
The use of ge- in the perfect ptc. is similar to the use of preverbs in
e.g. Slavic and Georgian to denote perfective aspect. In (West) Germanic,
the preverb *ga- apparently became generalized as a neutral perfective
marker, losing any meaning of its own, and was regularly prefixed to the
perf. ptc., except of course in the presence of another preverb.
I'm not sure why ge- is not used in the preterite.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...