From: tgpedersen
Message: 38617
Date: 2005-06-14
> tgpedersen writes:knowledge. In
>
> > 'jestem' is inflected like 'byl\em', right?
>
> Yes, you're on to something. But, again, that's handbook
> early Polish the old forms of 'to be' were most often used withthe
> l-participle to form the periphrastic past tense. Since they wereoften
> reduced to weak forms (rather like English 'm, 's and 're), theywere
> increasingly felt to be grammatical particles rather than fullverbs.
> 3pl. <sa,> had no weak form, and weak forms of 3sg. <jest> werevery
> rare, but both cold be omitted in the 3rd person of the preterite.Thus,
> the past tense of 'to be' provided a model for the formation of anew
> "strong form" of the present:I'll
>
> sg.[m.] 1. byl/-e(s')m', 2. byl/-es', 3. byl/ (jest)
> pl.[m.] 1. byli-smy, 2. byli-s'cie, 3. byli (sa,)
>
> (There was also a dual with person-marking particles added to m.
> <byl/a->, f.n. <byle->, but since it went out of use quite early,
> skip it.)is
>
> Note that the ending of the 1sg. past tense (Modern Polish -(e)m)
> also, historically, the weak form of Old Polish jes'm' < *h1esmi.The
> <s'> was still there in the 15th century.c. and
>
> Ideally, the analogical present should have looked like this:
>
> sg. 1. jest-e(s')m', 2. jest-es', 3. jest
> pl. 1. sa,-smy, 2. sa,-s'cie, 3. sa,
>
> Such forms of the 1/2pl. indeed coexisted with others in the 15th
> later, but were eventually eliminated by their doubly analogical<jest>
> competitors:
>
> pl. 1. jest-esmy (Mod.Pol. -es'my), 2. jest-es'cie
>
> The conservative 3pl. form might in theory have been replaced by
> (this actually has happened in Russian), but in Polish it hasmanaged to
> survive despite the pressure of analogy.What I (or Schmalstieg) claimed was that the original paradigm
>