Origin of reduplication, new idea.

So, hope I've got the tenses of the translation right this time:

> As examples of how much dei-, do:- is a function word in Low German:
> dat he blöden deit 'daß er blutet'
> Un as he do todegen tokieken deit
> "And as he then skillfully looks there"
> denn wunnern deit een sik "for one does wonder"
> Söök di ut, wat passen deit "Seek out for yourself what fits"
> un wat de allens vun sik wiesen doot
> "and what they all show of themselves"
> un wat de allens verkehrt maken doot "and what they all do wrong"
> wat froher en Rechtsanwalt kosten dee
> "what an attorney cost earlier"
> This is how one might imagine the Germanic weak preterite to have
> come about.




> > > What extra motivation do you need for the loss of a final
> > > phoneme? It is such a common pattern in languages. Final /t/
> > > is now regularly lost in some dialects of English.
> >
> > But it isn't final, like it is in English. It is second to last,
> > and all the endings are preserved, among them the dentals of the
> > 3sg, 123pl present. What phonological rule makes a second-to-last
> > dental go away and spares the final ones?
>
> Which means this loss of PIE *-ta- is some optional morpheme, and
> should be identical to other 'optional' PIE *-ta- 's, eg. OCS aorist
> 2,3sg -ta, Hittite preterite 2,3 -ta (= Hittite da(-is^) "did"?).
>

So, now that I have convinced myself that PIE *dheh1- and *doh3- are
really the same verb and that it occurs in both the Germanic weak
preterite and the *-ta of the 2,3sg of Hittite preterite and OCS
aorist I will go hunting for some other initial PIE category to
obliterate.

If the above was right, the old 3sg preterite must have ended in
*-Da- (where D is some dental, d, dh or t) "did" (cf. modern English
negative or interrogative sentences, and also especially the Low
German examples above, which have the added advantage of being in the
proper PIE SOV order).

But how about the preterite of the verb *dhe:-/do:- itself?
It must have been *de-do:- lit. "do-did", ie. "did do", or the like.
Remembering how important this verb is, this could have set a pattern
for how to form a preterite, namely *C1eC2- -> *C1eC1oC2-. Viola!
Reduplication has been invented!


Torsten