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The Old English Weak Preterites Without Medial Vowel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

E. Prokosch
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Extract

1. Sievers' Law of Syncopation of middle vowels has laid the foundation for our present understanding of the forms of the preterite and past participle of the first class of weak verbs: The medial vowel disappears before the period of mutation if the stem syllable is long, and is preserved if it is short. While Sievers had stated the law for West Germanic only, its somewhat modified application to Norse was obvious, so that chaos was apparently reduced to order. Irregular forms like leƷde, sœƷde were termed “anormal” by Sievers, and he adds the objective statement that several short stems in k, t, d, l form their preterite “nach Art der langsilbigen,” e.g., OE. reahte, sette, tredde, tealde. Two years later, Paul added the hypothesis that these preterites had had no medial vowel since Germanic times, supporting his view by certain criteria of such Germanic origin. He remarks: “Das Angelsächsische repräsentiert für uns im grossen und ganzen noch die eigentümlichste Stufe, und zwar liegt das offenbar daran, dass hier im Gegensatz zum Althochdeutschen und Altsächsischen der Umlaut der Synkopierung vorausgegangen ist.” It seems that Sievers never quite agreed with Paul's generalization of the scope of these preterites. As late as 1898, he postulates only a West Germanic basis for the “Rückumlaut” in verbs of the type cwellan-cwealde, sēceansōhte. But otherwise the view has been fairly generally accepted.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , June 1927 , pp. 331 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1927

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References

* Bibliographical notes are reduced to the scantiest source references, since the list of literature on the subject in Collitz, Das schwache Präteritum und seine Vorgeschichte (Hesperia, 1912; quoted in the following as “Collitz”) is remarkably complete.

1 Btr. V (1877), 23-61; 78 f.

2 Btr. VII (1879), 141 f.

3 l.c., 136-145.

4 l.c., 143.

5 Angelsächsische Grammatik,3 §407.

6 E.g., Wright, Old English Grammar,3 534, “A certain number of verbs belonging to class I formed their preterite and past participle already in prim. Germanic without the vowel -i-.”—Noreen, Allisländische Grammatik, §558; Dieter, Altgermanische Dialekte, §244 and a, Anm. 2—and many others.

7 Collitz, p. 29-98.

8 Histoire de la langue anglaise, I, p. 100.

9 Deutsche Grammatik, III, p. 77 ff.

10 Noreen, l.c., §508.

11 The term has been coined by Curme, in the second edition of his Grammar of Modern German, p. 315.

12 Cp. esp. Dieter, l. c., p. 494 f.

13 Die deutsche Lautverschiebung und die Völkerwanderung, JEGPh. XVI, 1 ff

14 Soon to appear in the (Iowa) Philological Quarterly.

15 OE. Gr., §534.

16 Cp. Hirt, Indogermanische Grammatik, II, 224.

17 Btr. XXXIX, 84 ff.

18 Collitz, p. 43.

19 Collitz, p. 105 ff.—Collitz' ingenious suggestion of a modified form of Grassmann's Law for Germanic does not solve the problem of these forms, although it serves well enough for habda, hogda, lagda, sagda, libda (class III).

20 MPh. XV and XVI; accepted by Collitz, MLA meeting of 1922, A J Ph. XXXIX 415 and Language II, 178 f. Also tentatively by Hirt, Indogermanische Grammatik, I, 219.

21 Collitz, p. 41.

22 Collitz, p. 74 ff.

23 Brugmann, Grdr., I,2 p. 233 ff.; K. Gr., p. 251.

24 Sievers, Grundzüge der Phonetik,5 §817.

25 Sievers, Angels, Gramm., p. 233 f.; Wright, OE. G.,3 p. 285.

26 Cp. Author, JEGPh., XX, 468 f., especially sections 20 and 26.

27 Evidently this does not agree with the current theory that mutation was caused by intervening palatalized consonants; my interpretation of “umlaut” will appear in the article on the Germanic Vowel Drift referred to in footnote 14.