German ge- ptcpl cognates?

CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU
Sat Jan 29 05:40:07 UTC 2000


Lloyd Anderson wrote, wondering whether the Greek and Sanskrit augment (found
also in Armenian) might in some sense be "cognate" with ge- found in German
past participles, asks:

>What is the origin of that prefix in German?

>Is it just barely conceivable that it might be related to
>the Sanskrit and Greek augment,
>and that it began with a laryngeal?

Since no one has otherwise proposes even one instance in which a laryngeal has
yielded *initial* Gmc. g-, the etymology would be entirely ad hoc  It has been
proposed that intervocalic or preconsonantal laryngeals have been "hardened" to
a velar in certain forms -- I've even accepted some such suggestions in print
-- but they are far from certain, and nothing warrants extending them to
initial position.

>I think the functions of German <ge-> and of the
>Greek and Sanskrit augment, in completive contexts,
>are highly similar.

Hardly.  Greek and Sanskrit apply the augment to the imperfect indicative, a
form which is anything *but* completive.  Germanic ge-/gi-/ga- once had
completive meaning: Middle High German _sitzen_ 'to be sitting' contrasted with
prefixed _gesitzen_ 'to sit down'.  It could occur on any form of the verb.
But the other prefixed verb forms also had perfective meaning; ge- was not
unique in this regard.  Meanwhile, the augment had purely past meaning.  So
Anderson's proposal fails on both phonetic and semantic grounds.

>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.)?

All West Germanic languages show some form of ge-.  But so does Gothic, which
has ga-.  Old Norse doesn't have it -- not surprising, since it doesn't have
the other familiar prefixes either.

Semantically, ge- matches Latin com- very well, since on nonverbal forms it
(like com-) it often has collective meaning.

>Or is there substantial support behind it,
>such as details of the gradual stages of infiltration from Latin?

There was no "infiltration from Latin"; if they are related, they are truly
cognate, i.e. lineal descendants of a form existing PIE, the ancestor of both
Latin and Germanic.

Phonetically, this is difficult, since initially, PIE k- should yield Gmc. h-,
not g-.  But g can result from h < k when "Verner's Law" applied.  This is also
difficult, since Verner's Law did not apply to initial consonants.  Or did it?
The prefix be- is sometimes derived from PIE *(H)epi-, the ancestor of a common
Greek prefix; the Germanic form would have b- rather than expected f- if
Verner's Law applied.  So at least there would be a parallel.

But all of this is *very* uncertain, and it may well be true that the
connection between ge- and com- is indeed for lack of any better explanation.
But the laryngeal solution you proposed is significantly worse, not better.

Leo

Leo A. Connolly                         Foreign Languages & Literatures
connolly at memphis.edu                    University of Memphis



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