> In Gothic, the a-verbs go as follows:
>
> I. *oi
> haita - hehait - hehaitum - haitans
> II. *ou
> auka - eauk - eaukum - aukans
> III. *oNC
> falþa - fefalþ - fefalþum - falþans
There is somthing odd about a III verbs in Swedish and Danish:
Sw falla - föll - föllo - fallen
Da falde - faldt - (old/dial. faldte/fulde) - falden (dial. fuldet)
Sw hålla - höll - höllo - hållen
Da holde - holdt - (holdte) - holden
If we assume that the reduplicated forms, as in Gothic, were
original, ie Proto-Germanic, then we get an easy explanation by
assuming that Danish got rid of the reduplication by discarding the
reduplication syllable, thus ending up with the vowel of the root,
whereas Swedish may have proceeded from some pret.pl. form such as
*fefl.- > *feful-, (*u > ö), and West Germanic in this case chose
the vowel of the reduplication syllable -e- (fell, held).
I wonder if it would be possible to come up with a similarly simple
solution if we assume that the perfect wasn't originally
reduplicated.
Odd, that there is this early and fundamental difference between
Danish and Swedish (there is no reduplicated preterites in Old
Danish and Old Swedish). As far as I could tell from the books on
dialect at my disposal, Jutland has almost exclusively the 'Danish'
forms. The 'Swedish' alternatives occur on the islands.
Perhaps the a III verbs had -o- -o- zero zero and the -o- was
generalised in Gothic?
Torsten