Re: Where does the 'Einheitsplural' come from?

From: tgpedersen
Message: 47011
Date: 2007-01-18

> The northern West Germanic languages also have "Einheitsplural",
> unitary plural identical in all three persons in the active, eg for
> the present
>
> Old English 123pl -aT
> Old Saxon 123pl -aD, -oD
> Old Frisian 123pl -ath
> Western Low German 123pl -en
> Eastern Low German 123pl -t
> Some English dialects(?) 123pl -n
>
> It occurred to me that those languages that have a unit plural in a
> dental are those that had a rule -nT- -> -T-, namely OE, OS and OF.
> That rule would change 3pl -nT (cf Gothic -nd, Old High German -nt)
> into -T. If there was a tendency to substitute 3pl for 1,2pl in
> northern West Germanic, as happened with Gothic passive, that would
> explain the rest of the story.

In the preterite the languages with unit plural all have -n, and those
without, eg. OHG and Gothic, have -un in the 3pl which strengthens
my suspicions that the unit plural was made by generalizing the 3pl.
Also that the 3pl pres must have had primary, pret secondary endings

Let's assume that in all the Germanic-speaking populations there were
the Germanic-speaking conquerors, who spoke with a proper
differentiated IE verbal plural, and the locals who used to speak a
PIE language which used the -nt-form for 123pl, since that language
hadn't incorporated the 12pl of the hi-conjugation into the
mi-conjugation like the other PIE languages, and that this unit plural
shone through in their newly acquired Germanic.

A real Germanic-speaker would inflect like this:
faru
feris
feriT
farames
feriT
farand

fo:r
fo:ri
fo:r
fo:rames
fo:riT
fo:run

A local (leti vel sim. in the north, something with -skalk in the
south according to Hans Kuhn) would inflect like this:

faru
feris
feriT
farand
farand
farand

fo:r
fo:ri
fo:r
fo:run
fo:run
fo:run

As a reaction to this plebeian simplification, the correct present was
defined by the conquerors to be:

faru
feris
feriT
farames
faraT
farand

which deviates from the originally correct form in the 2pl:
faraT instead of feriT (German 'Ihr fahrt') because the reproach was
one of syncretism, therefore a 2pl form equal to the 3sg (German 'er
fa¨hrt') must be wrong.

And that is why the Germanic languages don't have umlaut as they
should have had in the 2pl like they have in the 23sg, since umlaut is
caused by the e-forms of the thematic vowel.


Torsten