Re: Somewheres

On 2024-09-02, Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:

Have you ever wondered why the third person plural present tense
forms of Italian verbs are so strangely stressed, e.g., pàrlano
instead of *parlàno?  And where is that -o from anyway?

So that was an example where something was added at the end of
words.  I don't intend this as an invalidation of the general
observation that there is a longtime trend of phonetic erosion, but
I want to show that actual language history is complex and circuitous.

Here's another one.  From the King James Version, you may be familiar
with the second person singular indicative ending -(e)st (-t in
some verbs), "thou thinkest" etc.  German also has -st across the
second person singular.  Clearly, -st is an old 2SG marker...

... Except, Slavic has -š there.  Latin, not a language to drop final
-t, has -s.  Even Gothic has -s, and if you look at the variants
in early Old English and Old High German, the original 2SG ending
is also -s.

Where did the -t come from?  There are two hypotheses.  One, dismissed
by Ringe (and I'm skeptical as well), is from missegmentation when
the subject pronoun (tu ~ þu) followed the verb.  The other involves
the appearance of -s-t due to sound changes in some preterite-present
verbs, reanalysis as -st, and spread to other verbs.  Remarkably,
this appears to have happened independently in both English and
German.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de