Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Snidely Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,sci.lang Subject: Re: Somewheres Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2024 19:06:33 -0700 Organization: Dis One Lines: 43 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: snidely.too@gmail.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-15"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2024 04:06:37 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="293b0bd74e53775c43b6633e7b80078d"; logging-data="194486"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18lw2GEolZ1hQfURsVvm5hbQQMeHKihN3s=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:73wBO3mKb7OKP+Tryr+lN7CZ2zk= X-ICQ: 543516788 X-Newsreader: MesNews/1.08.06.00-gb Bytes: 3212 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 -- Rule #0: Don't be on fire. In case of fire, exit the building before tweeting about it. (Sighting reported by Adam F)