Re: Gmc. w-/g-, j-/g-

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Trond Engen <trond@...> wrote:

>
> dgkilday57:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:
> >
> >> [...]
> >>
> >> 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
> > difficultywith this is that a long vowel (OE -a:- corresponding to
> > Go. -ai-) mustbe abnormally syncopated in the second syllable of
> > these preterits.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > 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.
>
> I enjoy these long reasonings evoking analogical levellings and
> inter-dialect loans, but I always lose track. That probably says
> something about me.
>
> Are there other roots on that form? (A stray thought conceived by
> cross-pollination from somewhere else:) I wonder if there could be a
> very old derivational correspondence between this *keh1i- and the
> suggested *preih- (vel. sim.) of "dear; free"? Let's say *k-e-h1i-
> "here-move" and *pr-e-h1i- "fore-move"? (Stretching it I might even
> suggest a locational/pronominal origin of IE *dHe- "put; do". Really
> stretching it, I might suggest a meaning "in sight".)

I believe there are a few other roots in *-eh1i-, and I will try to cobble together a summary in a subsequent post. I never thought about decomposing them further, but I suppose this should not be ruled out.

I have been struggling with *dHeh1- and its possible connection to the (apparently) deadjectival root-extension *-dH- for some time. This began with an attempt at developing a digenetic theory of the Germanic weak preterit. I have no problem with taking the wk. pret. of derived verbs as an old periphrastic in *-dH-, but primary verbs (in particular the preteritive-present ones) seem to require *-t-, which I suspect comes from an old durative extension (full grade *-teh1-) found in Latin <niteo:>, <pateo:>, <lateo:>, <fateor> and a handful of Greek verbs. That is, I take the primary wk. pret. as an old "plupreterit" formed from the defunct durative, which avoids the problem of the origin of the endings faced by earlier theories of a /t/-preterit. But in order to synthesize this formation with the derived wk. pret. in *-dH-, it is necessary to explain the forms of the verb 'do' in all the Germanic languages, which is no mean task. Wilmanns observed that Otfrid has a strong and a weak present stem for this verb, with the distinction getting levelled out in later OHG. I have tried various ways of explaining this: 'do' as a class VII pret.-pres. verb, 'do' as derived from *dHe- not *dHeh1-, 'do' extracted from a periphrastic clitic, and so on. Nothing so far is satisfactory.

(Before anyone points me to Kortlandt's paper, "The Germanic Weak Preterit", for simple answers, I must object to some glaring ad-hoc steps in his analysis, like extracting *dHu-, Gmc. *du-, from the strictly 3pl. <adhur> of the Sanskrit root-aorist.)

Anyhow, class VII strong verbs are yet another can of worms, and what I posted about OE <leolc> and <heht> barely covers one worm. I am hoping for more feedback on this business of laryngeal metathesis in zero-grade, since it seems to pop up in various places. If I am on the wrong track with my interpretation, I would like to know.

DGK