German ge- ptcpl cognates?

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 8:51 PM

> Germanic *ga-  related to Latin co-:

> There is a discussion of this in Collinge, The Laws of IE, p 207, and
> reference to a paper by Bennett (1968) and a book by E Rooth, 1974, Das
> vernische Gesetz in Forschung und Lehre,  Lund/Gleerup.

> Collinge's summary is that the connexion still puzzles people.

> Peter

[Ed Selleslagh]
A personal, rather uninformed suggestion:

Could it be that there really are two different prefixes *ga-, one related to
the most frequent use of Latin co(n)- (e.g. Gemeinde, Gesellschaft...) and the
one in past participles, even though they still may have a common (PIE?)
origin, but branched into two separate uses with their own dynamics.

On the other hand, Lat. co- is ALSO used in a second type of context where the
notion of 'collectivity, togetherness...' is absent, while the meaning is
rather one of 'completion': comple:re, comedere....

So: It looks like both meanings exist in Latin and W.Germanic, but in one of
the two the syntactic characteristics are quite different.

Ed.