Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.szaf.org!inka.de!mips.inka.de!.POSTED.localhost!not-for-mail From: Christian Weisgerber Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,sci.lang Subject: Re: Somewheres Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2024 18:36:03 -0000 (UTC) Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2024 18:36:03 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: lorvorc.mips.inka.de; posting-host="localhost:::1"; logging-data="34234"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@mips.inka.de" User-Agent: slrn/1.0.3 (FreeBSD) Bytes: 2585 Lines: 30 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