Re: Germanic weak preterites from yet another angle

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

>
>
> Cayce: "Grammar of the Gothic language", p. 154
> '2. gaggan (§ 313, note i) is properly a reduplicated verb, the
> pret. of which, gaígagg, has been lost. The extant forms of iddja
> (§ 168) are inflected like nasida (§ 317); in one instance a weak
> pret. gaggida also occurs.'
>
> If iddja "went" is inflected like a weak preterite, it must tell us
> something about what the form is of the auxilliary verb *dhe:-.
> Elsewhere Cayce says 'Goth. iddja, I went, cp. Skr. áya:m', so he
> thinks it's an imperfect.
> But as far as I know, it takes -jj- > -ddj- in Gothic so we are one
> -j- short (Wikipedia: 'According to Lehmann (2007)
> ['Proto-Indo-European Phonology'?], the lengthening occurs as in
> the contexts of PIE *-VwH-, *-iyH-, *-ayH-, *-aHy- (where V is any
> short vowel, and H is any laryngeal).'
> So, is it *j-éje/o "made go"? 3sg. injunctive *ej-j-o:m?
>
>
> Something else:
> The Gothic second weak conjugation, salbo:da, must be based a
> nominal form salbo: (< PIE *solb-ax), plus a finite form of the
> *dhe:- verb.
> Now -ax is a common case form, which means that if we assume the
> unsuffixed verbal root could once be used as a participle vel sim.,
> the <root>-ax is case form of that stem and can be used as such in
> a periphrastic construction, cf. Latin 1st conj. ama:bam < *am-ax
> bhwom.
> That means there is no need for haplolology in at least the Gothic
> second conjugation, it's *salbo: dda, not *salbo:þ dda.
>
> With that success, why not try the Goth. 3rd conj., with the stem
> hab-a- with a < e: (cf. Latin). But it's 3sg pret. habaida, with
> -ida.
>
> Is this -ida < iddja?

When I shook my head, the last of the ingredients I tried to brew
this concoction on fell out:

Suppose PIE *ey- "go" in PPGmc had gone the way of Slavic and
faultily added a -dh- to the stem from the imperative -dhi, so >
*eidh > PGerm. *id- (cf. Da. id "action, activity", otherwise
mysterious). "Make go" would be *eyd-je-, "made go" *eyd-je-T > *eyd-
je: > *iddja? Unstressed -ida?

The reason I'm pursueing this line is that the Gmc. weak pret. shows
similarities both with the ppp in PIE -to, but also with a
periphrastic construction with *dhe:-. If originally some conj.'s
were the former, the rest the latter, we could explain the hybrid-
looking result as caused by mixing of conjugations.


Torsten