XPost: alt.usage.english   
   From: naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   On 2024-09-02, Christian Weisgerber  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   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)