Hello. I present to you a wall of text today. Ive realised lately how much of an IMMENSE amount of stuff can be written about the history of almost every single word in a language, and so I tried this out by writing about the development of the funky vowel and consonant changes in the paradigm of the modern Swedish verb slå (slår, slog, slagit...). Enjoy (or flee). –––– In modern standard Swedish (SV), the word for ’hit’ is slå, cognate of English (EN) ’slay’. Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse (ON) and today it has lost the verbal conjugation for person and number that was present in older SV and its ancestors. This strong verb, slå, has an interesting shift of vowels and consonants. The present tense form is slår, the preterite is slog, and the supine (the form used after auxiliary verbs denoting certain past forms, like EN ’have’, as in ’I have eaten’) is slagit. This text will attempt to explain why this is, and show that this development can be deconstructed by fully regular sound change and analogies, all the way back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the currently most ancient form ancestral to SV that we are able to reconstruct with any security today. In PIE, the word stem for SV slå was *slVk- (V = undetermined vowel, * = theoretically reconstructed form), and depending on whether the stress went on the stem or the suffix in PIE, the Proto-Germanic (PG) form would develop into either *slah- or *slag-. In ON, the PG *h disappeared entirely, but usually left lengthening on the preceding vowel. As such, PG *slah- became ON slá- (á = long a), and the long a of ON turned into the modern SV å. So that tells us why PG *sla- becomes SV slå- here and there. In SV, ’thou hittest’ is ’du slår’, and the PG form of that inflection sans the pronoun was *slahizi, which is the reason that Swedish today has an -r there. Four things happened here. In any order, *h disappeared, and *z turned into ON ʀ, a presumably approximant-like rhotic consonant that remained different from the inherited *r well into attested Norse, but today has merged with it across the board. Both regular changes. This left us with a post-PG but pre-ON vowel sequence *ai, which was different from the inherited PG *ai sequences, as those would have already developed into what would become ON ei, which is clear, because post-PG *ai regularly turned into ON á. The two passes of *ai therefore cannot have coëxisted, as they would have merged into the same reflex in that case. Thirdly, before the word-final *-i regularly dropped out of existence in ON, it left a mark in the form of i-umlaut, the nearly pan-Germanic process of fronting preceding back vowels in the vicinity of a suffix containing the vowel i. Adding all of this up, the process would have been something like PG *slahizi → *slaizi → *slázi → ON slæʀ. The fourth change was simply the ON merger of this 2nd person singular suffix -ʀ with the 3rd person singular suffix that should have become -ð (cf. English (EN) slayeth, PG *slahidi). Note that the modern Icelandic (IS) 2nd person form slærð is a later innovation. ON still had slæʀ for both. However, ON æ corresponds to SV ä, and the standard SV form is not *slär (although this occurs dialectally), but slår. So what happened? Most likely, as we shall see later also happened in the past tense, the vowel was analogously taken from the plural forms, perhaps with a little bit of help from the infinitive. The PG infinitive was *slahaną, and, for instance, the 1st person plural, ’(we) hit, slay’, was *slahamaz (this ending *-maz being cognate to the Latin -mus and the Spanish -mos). In both of these we see the same recurring sequence *-aha-, and if *-ahi- turned into *-ai- and eventually á, then quite clearly, *-aha- took the direct route to á (= *-aa-, literally). Per regular sound change, the ON forms of these two were slá and slá(u)m, respectively, corresponding to SV slå and Old SV slå(o)m. What about the *-z? Shouldn’t that have turned into -ʀ, giving ON *slá(u)mʀ, or the like? No. This does in fact seem to be another regular sound change. In Gothic, the sequence *mz regularly became simply m, and it seems likely that this has happened in ON too. Not only because of this example, which may also have been influenced by the past tense suffix, which, as we shall see, simply was *-um already in PG, but because there are other similar cases that only seem possible to explain by posing a rule that says that *Nz (N = any nasal, i.e. PG *n and *m) turns into *N at some point in pre-ON. One of these examples seems to be the accusative plurals of masculine nouns. For an easily recognisable example, consider PG *dagaz, the source of EN day and ON dagʀ, with the same meaning as the English reflex. In UG, the nominative and accusative plurals were *dagōz ~ -ōs and *daganz, respectively. The corresponding ON reflexes were dagaʀ and daga. The former retains the *-z → ʀ, while the latter has dropped out on it entirely, and thereby there is clearly no regular loss of PG *-z / V__# in ON. However, there was a nasal before the *-z in the PG accusative, and analogous to the change of *mz → *m, it seems like that must have been true of *nz → n as well. *n / V__# had then regularly dropped out without a trace by the time of attested ON, just like in the case of the infinitive, as we saw earlier. However, *m remained. So, by the help of further evidence, and an analogous sound change in Gothic, it seems safe to conclude that the 1st person singular indicative present tense suffix *-maz must have contracted into *-mz and then gone through a systematic loss of post-nasal *z. So that must be why the present tense in standard SV is slår rather than *slär today. It analogously took its vowel from the plural forms, and most likely got a little push from the infinitive’s identical vowel as well. A similar thing happened in the past tense, to which it is now time to move on. Analogous to the alternative form ’slew’ in modern EN, the modern standard Swedish form for ’hit’ (past tense) is slog. In this case, the vowel change stems all the way back to PIE. The strong PG preterites were derived from reduplicated forms in PIE, and as such, the PIE form would have been something like *s(l)e-slṓk-. This long o was inherited unchanged into PG, but the unstressed reduplicated syllable was eventually lost across the board, save for a handfull of words that had good reasons not to lose it. Thus, the PG form in the 1st and 3rd person singular was *slōh. This obviously does not correspond to what we have seen so far. We have seen that PG *h consistently disappeared in ON. Mentioned at the beginning of this text was the fact that PG *h would alternate with *g depending on where the stress lay in PIE. This stress system eventually collapsed in PG, consistently putting the stress on the first syllable of the stems, but PG retained reflexes of this ancient stress in the form of these consonant alternations. This is called Verner’s law. As such, the expected PG form ancestral to SV slog would be *slōg, but this was not the case. Indeed, even in ON, the 1st and 3rd person singular form was sló, as expected. However, the plural forms did have PG *g, such as the 1st person plural preterite *slōgum, which is what I was referring to earlier, on the subject of the loss of the *z in the present tense 1st person plural suffix *-maz. This past tense form might have helped secure that loss. Once again, the case simply must have been that the modern SV form took its g from the plural forms, perhaps helped by other forms with g. Note that slo is still a dialectally occurring form, be it because of a different generalisation, or because they too did generalise the g, but eventually lost it again due to later sound changes that did not take place in standard SV. Finally, we have reached the supine, slagit, analogous to EN ’slain’. This -n in the EN form occurs in Swedish too. The past participle of slå is slagen. The neuter form of this, in effect, adjective, is slaget. Historically, this is identical to slagit, and indeed, in most genuine dialects and in all of the other North Germanic varieties both dead and alive to this day, there is no difference between the neuter form of the present participle and the supine. The only reason that standard SV has any distinction is because it was artifically created in formal writing a few centuries ago, and the prestige of the written language over that time eventually found its way into the spoken language. Today, the distinction is naturally occurring among many speakers, despite its artificial origins. With that cleared up, it should be clear why I will now start by looking at the masculine singular nominative form of the past participle in PG, and not at any special supine or even any neuter form. This form, ancestral to SV slagen and English slain, was *slaganaz in PG. The most obvious fact here is that the PG form too had *g, and that it remained as such into modern SV. Again, we have an instance of a nasal and a *z separated by a vowel at the end of a word, but in this case, the previous rule cannot, and was not, applied. This might have been by analogy. Virtually all adjectives and participles ended in *-z in this form, and even if the rule of losing it after a nasal in this position would have applied under different circumstances, this *z was probably either retained all along, or reïntroduced by analogy later on, if it actually was lost. Another possible analogy might have been the retention of the vowel due to the vowel in between the stem and the *z in most adjectives. Perhaps *nVz never contracted, but only *mVz did. Perhaps the aforementioned verbal ending *-maz only contracted because of analogy with the past tense form *-um. Perhaps *-um was simply generalised, with no sound changes whatsoever being relevant to explain the loss of *z. Either way, all these past participles retained their reflex of *z into post-PG, and following the sound changes mentioned so far, one might expect something like ON *slaganʀ. This is not far off, but another sound change took place at some point, assimillating all instances of pre-ON *nz (as well as *lz and *rz) into geminates. Thus, we should actually expect ON *slagann. This is very close, but still not it. The ending, at some point, actually changed to *-inn and eventually SV *-en. This would turn out differently in West ON (WON), ancestral to IS, and East ON (EON), ancestral to Swedish. WON through this suffix applied i-umlaut to past participles, so that the WON form was sleginn, while EON generally did not, so that the EON form was slaginn, and from that point on the steps to SV slagen should be clear. The lack of i-umlaut supports the assumption that the PG ending indeed did have an *a and not an *i in it, and that the seemingly sporadic vowel shift in this ending must have happened at such a relatively late point, that EON did not derive any i-umlaut from it, as the past participles’ stem vowels must have already been too strongly fixed at that point. Finally, as we have seen, the SV supine slagit ~ -et, unlike EN slain, actually has a -t, which, again is due to this being the neuter form of the, in effect, adjective, consistently marked in ON as well as SV by this suffix. It seems PG did not have this ending, and that it was an individual development in North Germanic as well as German (GE) (cf. the word eins, the counting form of the numeral ein, and the regular neuter adjective ending -es, and the fact that t → s is a regular sound change in GE). PG did, however, have -t in the neuter form of a handful of common pronouns, such as *þat ’that’ and *hwat ’wat’ (GE das and was respectively, with the same change to s), derived directly from PIE *tod and *kʷód, with a similar neuter suffix *-d reserved for a handful of pronouns, and it seems like PG itself had already started generalising this suffix to a couple of more pronouns that did not actually have it in PIE. As such, at some point in post-PG, a pre-ON form such as *slagant might have been expected. The word-final loss of nasals before voiceless stops is a regular North Germanic sound change, and it happened word-internally as well. It would usually geminate the stop in the process, but the non-geminated t of the ON form slagit ~ slegit is likely due to the fact that it occurred in an unstressed syllable; monosyllabic pronouns such as ON hinn still had a geminate neuter form – in this case, hitt. SUMMARY: SV slår ← ON slæʀ ← PG *slahizi (2nd p. sg.) & PG *slahidi (3rd p. sg.) & PG *slaha- (pl. stem) ← PIE *slV́kesi? (2nd p. sg.) & PIE *slV́keti? (3rd p. sg.) & PIE *slV́kV-? (pl. stem) The -ʀ was generalised from the 2nd person singular into the 3rd person singular in ON, and in modern SV, this ending has been generalised across the entire paradigm. Confer modern IS, which retains the lack of any suffix in the 1st person singular, rendering it slæ. SV also generalised the plural stem vowel. SV slog ← ON sló + slóg- (plural stem) ← PG *slōh (1st & 3rd p. sg.) & PG *slōg- (pl. stem) ← PIE *s(l)eslṓ(H)ke? (1st & 3rd p. sg.) & PG *s(l)eslV(H)k-´? (pl. stem) The singular form originally had no final consonant by the time of ON, but standard SW reintroduced it by yet another analogy with the plural. SV slagit ~ -et ← (E)ON slagit ← PG *slagan- (pst. ptcpl. stem) & PG *-t (pronominal neut. suff.) ← PG *slagan- (pst. ptcpl. stem) & PG *-t (pronominal neut. suff.) ← PIE *slVk- + some suffix & PIE *-d (pronominal neut. suff.) And this is why I love words.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 18:25:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015