`tun' in Bavarian

[W. Schulze]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Inf.    dOa
> Sg. 1   dua
>     2   duasd
>     3   duad
> Pl. 1   dean
>     2   deadds
>     3   dean

What I learnt during my training on German dialects is this: the plural forms
stem from the subjunctive paradigm, hence we should correlate /dean/ [which I
often hear being pronounced  /deadn/] to /täten/ and /deadds/ [which I
sometimes hear being pronounced /dead[ed]s/] to /tätet/( plus Bavarian -s).
Hence /ea/ < /ä/ would be a good option. Naturally, the problem remains why
the indicative plural has been replaced by the subjunctive (historically, an
irrealis or 'mediated' realis!). As far as I know it is sometimes observed in
different languages that event constructions based on non-singular 'persons'
are rendered in a more modal way than those that shown the involvement of
singular 'persons'. This may reflect some kind of 'social [or perhaps better:
communicative] deixis'. But I'm not sure about that. At any rate the
distribution of the stem vowels most probably does not reflect a schematic
ablaut, in my humble opinion.

Wolfgang


--
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang M. Schulze
IATS - Institute for General Linguistics and Language Typology
[Institut fuer Allgemeine und Typologische Sprachwissenschaft]
Dept. II [Communication and Languages - Kommunikation und Sprachen]
F 13/14 - Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
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