German ge- ptcpl cognates?

[Eduard Selleslagh]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

----- Original Message -----
From: <ECOLING at aol.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 12:31 AM

> I was just recently contemplating the augment *e-
> which precedes certain completed-action verbs in
> Indic and in Greek, and which, I gather from one
> correspondent, is usually taken as an inheritance from
> some common stage, one of several manifestations
> of a close Greek-Vedic relationship.

[Ed Selleslagh]

I am no specialist in this matter, but I'm also wondering about the following:
In Greek only the sigmatic aorist has an augment (grápho - égrapsa), not
the asigmatic one (e.g. mod. Grk. vrisko - vrika [was: eureka]), while the
latter is probably older, like the 'strong' verbs in Germanic. I once heard
that the augment was basically prosodic, because the -sa ending didn't allow a
stressed syllable preceding it.

Is the Indic mechanism similar?

> If one takes that point of view, then it implies a Greek-Indic
> common innovation compared with PIE.
> Is that branch on a tree supportable?  (differs from UPenn, right?)

> If not, then must one take it as an inheritance from PIE,
> lost elsewhere?

> It occurs to me to wonder about German
> ge-  of past participles,
> which (with loss of /g-/) shows up also in the "e" of the English form
> "enough", related to German "genug",
> from o-grade of a verb *nek- 'to reach, attain'.

> What is the origin of that prefix in German?

[Ed]
And in Dutch, Afrikaans and Low-German (and Old English).

On the other hand, Dutch Saxon dialects don't use it (or lost it? - like
English).  BTW, if the verb begins with certain prefixes (be-, ver-, ont-/ent-,
zer-....) there is no ge-prefix in any of these lgs.

> Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to
> the Sanskrit and Greek augment,
> and that it began with a laryngeal?
> (I am fully aware that affixes do not always follow
> the same sound changes as do roots - but also very
> hesitant to posit an otherwise unproven irregularity
> of sound change, so would want some pretty good
> demonstrations of cognate functions, at least ones
> which could develop from a common origin.
> I think the functions of German <ge-> and of the
> Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts,
> are highly similar.

> Could the origin have been something like this?
> (or with a different vowel, reduced to /e/ as for
> many other German unstressed verbal prefixes,
> then generalized ...?)

> *He-

[Ed]

Note also the e- verbal prefix in Basque (the 'infinitives' are actually
participles, like - vice versa however - in Modern Greek). Phonetically, the
evolution ke > he > e is perfectly possible and normal in Basque. There is
still some discussion whether initial k or similar existed in PB, but it isn't
totally excluded any longer.

This makes the question all the more interesting, doesn't it?

> ??

> Pardon, I am not a Germanicist and have
> no immediate access to something that would tell me.
> Pokorny's Comparative Germanic Grammar
> pp.205-206 states a relation to Latin co(m)-,
> but such a hypothesis is to me much more improbable on
> semantic grounds.  In this view, I would assume,
> the /gV-/ prefixes gradually spread from their point of
> origin at the expense of other prefixes.  Perfectly possible.
> Was that hypothesis posited long ago for simply for
> lack of anything better, or because <ge-> shows up only in some
> of the western Germanic languages (OHG, English, etc.)?
> Or is there substantial support behind it,
> such as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin?

[Ed]

That 'Latin explanation' looks like the result of the lack of a better idea.
Isn't the ge- prefix likely to be much older than the contact with Latin?

Anyway, this problem is extremely intriguing to me.

> Best wishes,
> Lloyd Anderson

Ed. Selleslagh.