PIE ablaut & Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) wrote:

>The Germanic forms that clearly go back to an IE 'perfect' are the
>preterite-presents like Gothic wait, witum corresponding to Greek oi~da,
>i'dmen. The original vowel alternation within a single verb paradigm would
>seem to be that between the singular and plural as in Gothic wait, witum.
>In Hittite this vowel alternation is exemplified by verbs like kuenzi,
>kunnanzi 'strike' or eszi, asanzi 'be' (full grade, zero grade) where the
>third person plural is zero grade as opposed to other full grade persons.
>Hittite does not have the e:o alternation, and Germanic too probably did
>not originally.

Hittite does have e/a alternation in some verbs of the
hi-conjugation, with <e> in the plural, <a> in the singular.
E.g. sakhi, sakti, sakki, [*sekweni], sekteni (sakteni),
[*sekkanzi] "to know" (similarly in the past tense).

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Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl