From: dgkilday57
Message: 71672
Date: 2014-01-08
---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <dgkilday57@...> wrote:
[...]
In Germanic one would expect PIE *g^n.h3-tó- to yield *kunDa- by Grimm's Law, prevocalization of the syllabic resonant, loss of the following laryngeal in this position, and Verner's Law. Instead Gmc. *kunþa- 'known' is indicated by Gothic _kunþs_, Old English _cu:þ_, and Old High German _kund_. As with _phílos_ and _téknon_, the simplest explanation is a high-frequency vocative, commonly occurring in utterance-initial position when members of the same community addressed each other. I presume that the inputs of this word to Verner's Law were oxytone in all cases but the vocative, and that the vowel-mergers *o > *a, *a: > *o: occurred at a later stage of Proto-Germanic than Verner's Law.
Thus, immediately before Verner's Law, Proto-Gmc. 'known' had nom. sg. masc. *kunþós, fem. *kunþá:, nom. pl. masc. *kunþó:s, fem. *kunþá:s against voc. sg. masc. *kúnþe, fem. *kúnþa, voc. pl. masc. *kúnþo:s, fem. *kúnþa:s. Immediately after Verner's Law, the nom. forms were *kunDós, *kunDás, *kunDó:s, *kunDá:s against voc. *kúnþe, *kúnþa, *kúnþo:s, *kúnþa:s. Later the PGmc accent became fixed on the root, leading to a paradigm with a vocative stem *kunþ- against *kunD- used in the other cases. With most originally oxytone nouns and adjectives subject to Verner's alternation, the seldom-used vocative stem was replaced by the other stem. But the voc. stem *kunþ- not only had a relatively high frequency; it also had a tradition of respect in formal address. It would have been UNCOUTH to address one's kinsman as *kunDe rather than *kunþe. As a result the voc. stem *kunþ- prevailed over *kunD-, not the other way round.
The parallel PIE deverbative *g^n.h1-tó- yielded the expected Gmc. *kunDa- 'begotten, born, child' reflected in Go. _himina-kunds_ 'heaven-born', OE _heofon-kund_ 'id.', and Old Norse _kundr_ 'son'. But ON _a:s-kunnr_ 'descended from the Asen' requires Gmc. *kunþa-, which I believe is to be explained somewhat like the accent of Grk. _téknon_. Immediately after Verner's Law, the various forms of the simplex 'born' were homophonous with the corresponding forms of 'known', with context indicating which was meant. The voc. *kúnþe 'O known one, kinsman' was used in polite address to adults of equal status, while *kúnþe 'O begotten one, son' was used in familiar address to children or, figuratively, to adults of lesser status. After the voc. stem *kunþ- had ousted *kunD- from the paradigm of 'known', *kunD- had the upper hand in 'begotten, born' since it involved no ambiguity whatever. Yet the vocs. *kúnþe, *kúnþa 'O child' persisted long enough in familiar settings to produce an alternate paradigm *kunþa- 'child, descendant', and this is what is preserved in ON _a:s-kunnr_.
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This accent-based proposal cannot plausibly be extended to explain certain weak preterits with underlying *-nþ-, namely Go. _kunþa_, OE _cu:ðe_, ON _kunna_ 'knew (how), could', OE _u:ðe_, ON _unna_ 'granted', and Northern English _begouth_ (1375), _beguld_ (1535), _begude_ (1657), etc. 'began'.
(Middle English _couth(e)_ was apparently not felt to be properly marked as a preterit. One finds also _couthde_ and later on _coud(e)_, which prevailed. According to the OED, the unetymological -l- began to be used in spelling around 1525 in mechanical imitation of _should_ and _would_, whose etymological -l- had become silent. The same thing explains _beguld_ and the more common recent spelling _begould_ beside _could_.)
For three centuries, the most popular way of explaining the weak preterit has been to assume composition of the stem with a form of the verb 'do', which reflects PIE *dHeh1-. That is, the dental is supposed to continue PIE *dH. Most of the handbooks and textbooks claim that the weak preterit of preteritive-present verbs like 'can' is a recent innovation within Germanic, the adaptation of the dental preterit from ordinary weak verbs to PP verbs. Thus, most weak-preterit theorists simply ignore issues involving the preterit of PP verbs. However, Hermann Möller observed that the preterits mentioned above cannot continue PIE *dH, but only PIE *t. The dental of the weak preterit typically appears as Gmc. *d not because it reflects PIE *dH, but because the dental suffix was stressed and PIE *t became Gmc. *d by Verner's Law.
One must now explain why Verner's Law did not shift the *þ in the preterits mentioned to *d. Unlike the situation with vocatives, Vedic accentuation offers no clue. The principal verb in a Vedic sentence generally has no accent unless it begins the sentence or immediately follows a vocative which begins the sentence. When this happens, the accent is the same as what the verb would have if it stood in a subordinate clause, generally agreeing with the Early Proto-Germanic accent deduced by Verner from grammatical change in North and West Germanic verbs. There is no mechanism for producing original recessive accent in the preterits mentioned above. Some other way of maintaining *þ in these preterits is required, preferably one which will also account for it in the adjective 'couth', since theoretical economy is always desirable.
Elmar Seebold argued that the geminates appearing in the PP verbs in question, OE _cunnan_ 'know (how), be able' and _unnan_ 'grant', resulted from root-final laryngeals (Die Geminata bei gm. _kann_, _ann_ und anderen starken Verben, KZ 80:273-83, 1966). The singular stem *kann- thus reflects the /o/-grade *g^onh3-, the plural stem *kunn- the zero-grade *g^n.h3-, of the PIE root *g^neh3- 'know'. OE _unnan_ is brought together with Greek _oníne:mi_ 'I profit, benefit, help' whose /e:/ reflects earlier /a:/ (cf. Doric 3sg. fut. act. _onaseî_, 1sg. aor. pass. _o:náthe:n_, both Theoc.). Thus the PIE root is identified as *h3neh2-; Gmc. *ann- and *unn- continue *h3onh2- and *h3n.h2-. Seebold began his paper by carefully picking apart the possibility that the -nn- in both verbs originated from nasal presents.
Nevertheless, Alfred Bammesberger rejected Seebold's analysis in favor of nasal-present genesis (The Paradigm of Germanic *aih/aig-u- and Notes on Some Preterite-Present Verbs, NOWELE 26:57-66, 1995). In footnote 21 he scoffed that "the sound-law [i.e. *-n@- > *-nn-] seems by no means certain, and the pre-form *g^on@- would not have occurred in the perfect paradigm *g^e-g^no:-". No, but it could have occurred in an archaic unreduplicated paradigm parallel to *woid-/wid- (Gmc. *wait-/wit- 'know'). In footnote 5 A.B. noted that "Szemerényi maintains that originally all perfect paradigms had reduplication, so that we would reconstruct *we-woyd-, which, at an early stage, was reduced to *woyd- because of its high frequency (Einf. in die vgl. Sprachwissenschaft, 3. Aufl., 1989, p. 314)". This stands reasoning on its head. The archaic UNREDUPLICATED perfect of this root survived into several branches of IE due to its high frequency. In Germanic, where reduplication never became a highly productive method of stem-marking, the archaic perfect survived and prospered.
Now, in Hittite the laryngeals *h2 and *h3 in certain positions functioned as consonants and are attested as such in the writing, but *h1 and *h4 in the same positions have disappeared. This suggests that *h2 and *h3 were the strong laryngeals, *h1 and *h4 the weak ones. W.P. Lehmann supposed that consonantal laryngeals in Proto-Germanic had fallen together into two phonemes *X1 and *X2. Tentatively I will assign *X1 to the weak post-laryngeal resulting from *h1 or *h4, *X2 to the strong one from *h2 or *h3. I will further assume, provisionally of course, that *X1 merely disappeared from the Early PGmc cluster *-nX1þ-, but *X2 was strong enough in this position to merge with the fricative and geminate it, producing *-nþþ-. This resulted in a distinction of the /to/-participles from PIE *g^enh1- 'bear young' and *g^neh3- 'know' being maintained, to wit:
*g^n.h1-tó- > *kunX1þó- > *kunþó- > *kunDa- > *kunda-
*g^n.h3-tó- > *kunX2þó- > *kunþþó- > *kunþþa- > *kunþa-
Verner's Law did not act on the geminated fricative in 'couth', which was later simplified in post-heavy position. This new mechanism renders my old explanation of 'couth', in the first two paragraphs reproduced above from my old post, superfluous. However, an accent-based mechanism is still required to explain ON _a:s-kunnr_, as outlined in the third paragraph. The familiar vocatives *kúnþe, *kúnþa 'O child' were not modified by Verner's Law due to their recessive accent, and they survived long enough to create an alternate paradigm *kunþa- 'child' beside the more usual *kunDa-. Indeed, since Upper German shows evidence of retention of other post-heavy geminates until the second Lautverschiebung had run its course, it is likely that the latest Proto-Germanic still had *kunþþa- 'known, couth, kinsman', with which *kunþa- 'child' would not have been confused.
On the weak preterit, I differ from the mainstream in two principal ways. First, I regard the dental suffix as continuing a PIE durative *-téh1- originally attached to zero-grade and preserved in Latin _lateo:_ 'I lie hidden, escape (the) notice (of)', _pateo:_ 'I lie open, stretch out, extend', and _niteo:_ 'I shine, glitter, radiate', and a handful of Greek verbs. Second, I regard the weak preterit of PP verbs as ancient, inherited from PIE, not cobbled together recently on the model of ordinary weak verbs. Thus PIE *wid-téh1- regularly produced PGmc *wisse:-, OE _wisse_ 'knew' (later also _wiste_ after _dohte_, _þorfte_, _dorste_, etc. whose -te was regular); PIE *mn.-téh1 gave Gmc. *munde:-, OE _munde_ 'remembered'; PIE *g^n.h3-téh1- gave *kunX2þé:-, later *kunþþé:-, Late PGmc *kunþþe:-, Low West Gmc. *kunþe-, OE _cu:ðe_ 'knew (how), was able'; PIE *h3n.h2-téh1- gave *unX2þé:-, similarly leading to OE _u:ðe_ 'granted'.
In previous posts I argued that PIE *g^Hen- 'pick up, take up, elevate' vel sim. was the root of Latin _hono:s_, later _honor_, and Gmc. *-ginnanaN 'to begin' (found with several prefixes; perhaps the simplex was a PP verb in PGmc). I supposed that the Gmc. *-nn- was due to an /n/-present or a /w/-present. It now seems more likely that the root was *g^Henh2/3-, with the *þ underlying _begouth_ arising the same way as in _cu:ðe_ and _u:ðe_. R.S.P. Beekes regards _hono:s_ as an /s/-stem in which *-o:s from the nom. sg. has been extended to all the (Old) Latin cases (Comp. I-E Ling., 1995, p. 180). This does not permit distinguishing *h2 from *h3 in this position, assuming that the other analysis to this point is correct.
Douglas G. Kilday