XPost: alt.usage.english
From: snidely.too@gmail.com
Christian Weisgerber suggested that ...
> 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., pārlano
>> instead of *parlāno? 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 -¨ 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 ~ ūu) 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.
I relate all this discussion to what Charlton Laird (sr, IIRC)
considered two fundamental principles of language change:
1) People are lazy, leading to simplification.
2) People are inventive, leading to new words and new constructions.
/dps
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