Conjugation of ДАТЬ?

[bigjim at U.WASHINGTON.EDU]

Very briefly there were thematic and athematic verbs at one time. In the thematic type, verbs whose stem ended in a consonant supplied a vowel before endings beginning with a consonant, this vowel was o-like in the first singular and third plural before the nasals -m and -n and e-like in the other persons of the present tense (*-on and -om change to -u eventually).

Thus id- became id-o-m and id-o-nt, but id-e-sh, id-e-t, id-e-m, id-e-te (ignoring the final vowels that followed the consonantal personal endings). 

While the athematic verb stem dad- became dad-m, dad-sh, dad-t with no inserted vowel. 

The sound changes in Russian caused subsequent development of the -om and ont endings to -u and -ut for id-. And the dad- verb lost or changed its final stem consonant when it came into contact with another consonant due to the lack of insertion of a theme vowel and this caused the second d of dad- to disappear except before another dental where it became -s-, yielding dam from dad-m, dash from dad-sh and dast from dad-t. (again ignoring the final vowels that were reduced and ultimately disappeared).

The plural of dad- was influenced by i-verbs such as hod-i-. These verbs added the same personal endings but did not require the insertion of a vowel except before the -m of the first singular and the -nt of the third plural.  Thus hodi-o-m*, hodi-sh, hodi-t, hodi-m, hodi-te, hodi-i-nt*  are straightforward except for the places where the vowel insertion took place in spite of the -i- at the end of the stem. Thus we have dadim, dadite but dadut, the latter form behaving like id- in the 3rd plural form.
*further changes took place when two vowels came together in the development of Slavic, the i before o became j and subsequently caused the preceding consonant to change and the i before i simply melded together into one i.

This is a great oversimplification of the development of the present tense in Russian, but I have found it works when curious first-year students demand to know why all verbs are not conjugated alike?

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
 James Augerot, Professor Emeritus
 Slavic Languages and Literatures 353580
 University of Washington, Seattle 98195
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014, Terry Moran wrote:

|The best answer: c'est comme ça. It's an irregular verb: get over it!
|
|Terry Moran
|
|On 18 September 2014 19:58, Peter Scotto <pscotto at mtholyoke.edu> wrote:
|      Can anyone either give me a rundown on, or point me to a web place that explains why дать conjugates the
|      way it does?
|
|One of my students in my second-year class asked me this, and I had no answer.
|
|Peter Scotto
|Mount Holyoke College
|------------------------------------------------------------------------- Use your web browser to search the
|archives, control your subscription options, and more. Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
|http://seelangs.wix.com/seelangs -------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|------------------------------------------------------------------------- Use your web browser to search the archives,
|control your subscription options, and more. Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
|http://seelangs.wix.com/seelangs -------------------------------------------------------------------------
|

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                        http://seelangs.wix.com/seelangs
-------------------------------------------------------------------------