--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:
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> As I noted elsewhere, <reord>, <leort>, and <on-dreord> belong to one subclass of verbs, and <leolc> and <heht> to another. I believe their formations are distinct: the three former are /r/-preterits, while the latter two are reduplicated.
The Old English reduplicated preterits <leolc> 'jumped' and <heht> 'called, ordered, effected' are sometimes equated directly with Gothic <laíláik> [lelaik] and <haíháit> [hehait]. The principal difficulty with this is that a long vowel (OE -a:- corresponding to Go. -ai-) must be abnormally syncopated in the second syllable of these preterits.
Gothic <láikan> 'to jump', with its Germanic cognates meaning 'to jump, play, be active, fly, swim', etc., is traditionally referred to a Proto-Indo-European *loig-, the /o/-grade of Pokorny's root *leig- 'hüpfen, beben, beben machen' (IEW 667-8). Greek <elelízein> 'to cause to shake' and <elelíkhtho:n> 'earth-shaking' are usually placed here also. Mallory and Adams thus cite the IE root as *h1leig- 'jump', but their implicit analysis is faulty. A root of this shape would form the Greek weak perfect stem *ele:lig- (*h1le-h1lig-) by so-called Attic reduplication, just as *h2/4leibH- 'smear, anoint' forms the Attic-Ionic perfect <alé:lipha> (*h2/4le-h2/4libH-) to <aléipho:> 'I anoint'. Instead, <elelízein> is based on an isolated Epic Greek third-person singular pluperfect passive <elélikto> used in an aoristic sense. From this <elelig-> was extracted and used to make a new aorist active <eléliksa> and passive <elelíkhthe:n>, and a new /j/-present <elelízo:>. But the original weak perfect stem in <elélikto> is *lelig-, which indicates a root with no initial laryngeal.
On the other hand, the accent of Lithuanian <láigyti> 'to run around wildly' points to a root-internal laryngeal. In this connection it is useful to examine the vocalism of the Germanic forms. The present system continues Proto-Gmc. *-ai- in Old Norse <leika>, Old Swedish <le:ka>, and Old English <la:can>, as do the quotable past participles, ON <leikenn> and OE <la:cen>, and the Gothic preterit 1/3sg. <laíláik>. Proto-Gmc. *-e:- is reflected by the pret. 1/3sg. ON <le:k>, OSw <læ:k>, and OE <le:c> (more usual than <leolc>). As is typical for class VII strong verbs, the pret. pl. has the same stem as the pret. sg., with the exception of the OSw pret. pl. <liko>.
This OSw archaism suggests a possible explanation for OE <leolc> which does not require ad-hoc syncope of the long syllable in a form parallel to Go. <laíláik>. In this and similar reduplicated forms Gothic has evidently generalized the /o/-grade of the PIE perfect singular to the plural (e.g. <haíháit> 1/3sg. 'called', <haíháitum> 1pl.). Prehistoric OE (or Proto-Anglo-Frisian or whatever) could have generalized the zero-grade, corresponding to OSw <liko>, from the pl. to the sg. That is, <leolc> (in the southern dialects of OE, since Northumbrian kept -io- and -eo- distinct) could continue earlier *liolc, following the old pret. pl. *liolcun, regularly broken and syncopated from the inherited 3pl. *lilicun. With this root, the */e/ of the reduplicator would have undergone /i/-umlaut in Proto-Germanic; the perf. pl. stem *le-lik- would have regularly become *li-lik-. This might well have been restored to *le-lik- by analogy with the perf. sg. stem *le-laik- and with other perf. pl. stems having a root-nucleus other than */i/. (In Gothic, the reduplicator evidently escaped the general raising of */e/ to */i/ by piecewise analogical restoration. It is too much to believe that all Go. redup. preterits follow the purported example of those with root-initial /r/, /h/, and /hW/, and have lowered their */i/ back to /e/.) But in prehistoric OE, a restored plural stem *lelik- would again have become *lilik- during the stage of specifically OE /i/-umlaut, when reduplication was moribund and no significant morphological pressure existed to restore the */e/.
The PGmc *-e:- (i.e. close */ê/) reflected in the unreduplicated preterits evidently arose from Paleo-Gmc. *-e:i- (cf. Sievers, PBB 18:409-10, 1894) in closed position, and this is actually the PIE /e/-grade *-eh1i-. This type of preterit is thus a root-aorist in origin, not a perfect. Lith. <láigyti> must then continue the /o/-grade *-oh1i-, with the acute accent as the laryngeal's shadow. But this sequence *-oh1i- in closed position did not become *-o:i- on its way to Germanic. Instead the laryngeal simply vanished here, and Paleo-Gmc. *-oi- became PGmc *-ai- in the /o/-grade. (E.g. PIE *meh1- 'great', *móh1-is 'greater, more' (neuter as adverb), *móh1-is-on- 'greater' (adjective) > PGmc *maiz adv., *maizan- wk. adj. > Go. <máis>, <máiza>, OE <ma:>, <ma:ra>.) In the zero-grade, the postconsonantal laryngeal vanished before */i/. We thus have the following scheme:
Root-aorist stem: PIE *leh1ig- > PGmc *le:k-
Present stem: PIE *loh1ig- > PGmc *laik-
Perf. sg. stem: PIE *le-loh1ig- > PGmc *le-laik-
Perf. pl. stem: PIE *le-lh1ig- > PGmc *le-lik- > *li-lik-
M&A's root *h1leig- 'jump' should thus be corrected to *leh1ig-. The fact that Sanskrit <ré:jate:> 'hops, shakes, quakes' and its relatives show no sign of the root-internal laryngeal is no problem. Lubotsky in "Reflexes of intervocalic laryngeals in Sanskrit" (Kuryl/owicz Mem. Vol. 1:213-33, 1995), has shown that Proto-Indo-Iranian *-ah{x}i- became Skt. -e:- within a single morpheme, or more generally where there was no morphological pressure to restore the laryngeal. An example is <dhe:nú-> 'dairy cow' (occurring 122 times in the Rig-Veda) from PIE *dHeh1i-nu-. (In open position, *-oh1i- was actually *-oh1j- which became Paleo-Gmc. *-ojj- > PGmc *-ajj-. E.g. PIE *dHeh1i- 'suck', prevocalic /o/-grade *dHoh1j- > PGmc *dajjanaN, Go. <daddjan>, ON <deggia> 'to suck'.)
Similar considerations apply to Go. <háitan>, ON <heita>, OSw <he:ta>, OE <ha:tan> 'to call, name, command'. If the PIE root is taken as *kei-d- (extended from *kei- 'to set in motion'), there is no principled way of getting Gmc. *-e:- into the unreduplicated preterits, ON 1/3sg. <he:t> (beside <heit> with pres. vocalism), OSw <hæ:t>, OE <he:t> (beside less usual <heht>). The PIE root should be *keh1id-. For zero-grade I do not have an archaic pret. pl. like OSw <liko> above, but I believe that the OE pret. pl. <hehton> continues a zero-grade form. It is striking that <heht> and <hehton> do not show breaking in West Saxon like <feoh>, <feohtan>, etc. This suggests that they are hypercorrect forms, borrowed after the stage of /e/-breaking from a dialect which frequently had -eo- for WS -e-, so that word-borrowers would be likely to implement a knee-jerk rule: When borrowing from this dialect, always replace -eo- with -e-. In both Kentish and Mercian, back-vowel umlaut of -e- to -eo- (involving -a-, -o-, or -u- in the next syllable) was more extensive than in pure West Saxon, where it was usual only after a simple liquid or labial, e.g. <heorot> 'hart', <heofon> 'heaven'.
Thus I propose that the Anglo-Frisian 3pl. pret. *hihitun (parallel to *lilicun above) was retained in Kentish (or another dialect with extensive back-vowel umlaut) and was regularly syncopated to *hihtun, broken (or umlauted) to *hiohtun, and lowered to *heohtun. As assumed above for <leolc>, the pret. sg. *heoht followed the pret. pl. These forms were then hypercorrectly West-Saxonized as <hehton>, <heht>.
Root-aorist stem: PIE *keh1id- > PGmc *he:t-
Present stem: PIE *koh1id- > PGmc *hait-
Perf. sg. stem: PIE *ke-koh1id- > PGmc *he-hait-
Perf. pl. stem: PIE *ke-kh1id- > PGmc *he-hit- > *hi-hit-
I have no problem taking the *-d- as a root-extension, but M&A's root *kei- 'set in motion' should be corrected to *keh1i-. Pokorny had the right idea, citing it as *ke:i- 'in Bewegung setzen, in Bewegung sein' (IEW 538-9), not as *kei-. While Latin <citus> 'quick, speedy' has the expected zero-grade *kh1i-, Greek <ki:né(w)o:> 'I set in motion' apparently has a metathetic zero-grade *kih1-. This type of zero-grade also occurs in Germanic. Old Swedish <di:a> 'to suck' evidently reflects metathetic *dHih1-, not *dHh1i-, to the prevocalic full grade *dHeh1j- in *dHéh1jos, Skt. <dhá:yas> n. 'act of sucking' (and the /o/-grade *dHoh1j- in Go. <daddjan>, ON <deggia> above). I could give several paragraphs of similar metatheses involving roots in *-eh{x}i- and *-eh{x}u-. Unfortunately, I cannot fully state the conditions under which laryngeal metathesis occurred.
DGK