Re: Mi- and hi-conjugation in Germanic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
wrote:

>
> > 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?
>
>

BTW Old Norse has -e- (and no reduplication) in the preterite in
a III, as does West Germanic. There's no way to derive the Danish or
Swedish forms from that. It seems to be consistent with Old Norse
being a language of the upper class which got rid of its
reduplicated forms in a way different from how the lower classes got
rid of them.

Torsten