Getic

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Clio
sinic
sinic
Posts: 228
Joined: 27 Dec 2012 23:45

Re: Getic

Post by Clio »

@shimobaatar: As always, it's great to see you drop into this thread! Thank you for spotting all the typos, which I've cleaned up. Now, as to your questions, I'm going to tackle the simpler ones first:

-The irrealis moods have become the Getic future tenses.

-No, -ī-, -ǎ-, and -- don't have much in the way of semantic meaning. In Getic, verbal characterization is much more a morphological than derivational phenomenon. The ī-stems, for instance, really come from a couple Indo-European verbal classes; and although the ǎ- and -stems are mostly denominal verbs, those classes also include a large number of loanwords.

-Ablaut between the thematic vowels -o- and -e- is ancient (see, e.g., Greek 1pl. -ομεν vs. 2pl. -ετε). Thus, the endings with thematic vowel -a- are the regular development of the Indo-European endings; uniquely in Getic, however, the thematic vowel -e- was raised to -i- before -i in the second- and third-person primary endings -esi and -eti. Thus, we wind up with three thematic vowels: -a- (in the 1pl. ending, lengthened in the 1sg. ending, and nasalized in the 3pl. ending), -e- (in the 2pl. ending), and -i- (in the 2sg. and 3sg. endings).

-The confusion about šǎǧīd is my fault. The accent is only attracted away from the root by the ending -ǎmi (due to the laryngeal in -oHmi), so class III rhizotonics constitute a special case; otherwise, rhizotonic means exactly that--accented only on the root.

-I don't think much else can be said about correspondences between past and present classes; since the sigmatic class is by far the most productive, the others just constitute a few stragglers from various present classes.

-Yes, the prime symbol is the apostrophe.

-Regarding past stem vowels' relation to the vowels in other stems: First of all, this obviously only applies to the verbs which show ablaut; in the contract verbs, for instance, the stem always has the same vowel. Now, the Getic root is an abstraction in many cases. There are certain verbs that always show some characterization: e.g., iotation in the present, the sigmatic suffix in the past, and ablaut in the perfect. (To make this more concrete, take an imaginary verb péťid, epést, pepaté, pepatêd; this verb has a theoretical root pet-, but it never actually appears as the stem.) Certain verbs, however, do occasionally show their bare roots, such as elígd (root lik-) and the verb eǧéded (root *ǧed). Since eǧéded shows a thematic vowel the present and past stems have the same vowel, while the perfect singular and plural have other vowels. (The thematic vowel's presence is a condition I originally forgot but have since edited into the post above.) On the other hand, elígd has no thematic vowel, and thus the past and perfect plural stems have the same vowel. As you can probably guess, it's much more common for the past stem to have the same vowel as the present stem, due to the prevalence of the non-ablauting sigmatic and thematic classes. If a past stem does show ablaut, though, it is guaranteed that the perfect plural stem will contain the same vowel.

-A verb with an initial consonant cluster simply reduplicates the first consonant of the cluster.

-I've added an explanation of the vowel-length alternations in the conjugation of ēdé; basically, it's all Osthoff's Law.

-I suspect yésti is defective and lacks both perfect and future II forms.

Now, there are a few questions you asked that I want to answer together because they really get at the fundamental nature of the Getic verb in relation to its Indo-European relatives. Terms like verbal characterization and ablaut are applied to many languages in Indo-European studies, although different scholars certainly have different terms they prefer. It's important to recognize that (at least in the older languages like Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit), the various tenses are derived from a root, and the different means of derivation are the reason for the existence of multiple conjugations and subclasses within them. For instance, Latin shows ablaut in the perfect tense of the verb ago, ēgi; the Greek verb μανθάνω removes a nasal infix and -άν- suffix from the present to form the aorist ἔμαθον. (Getic never developed a suffix like -άν-, which is unique to Greek; and due to nasalization, what was once merely the removal of a nasal infix becomes, in Getic, ablaut.) What Latinists and Hellenists call principal parts are really the set of verb forms that show each of the stems a verb can take in its conjugation. Due to the practice of referring to these principal parts, it's not common to hear of, say, ablaut, in these contexts.

I got a lot of inspiration for the Getic verbal system from Classical Armenian and in particular its description in the book Tense and Aspect in Indo-European Languages by John Hewson and Vit Bubenik. That was the source of the present-past-perfect system (although Armenian arrived at its system rather differently from Getic) and hence of the imperfect/aorist collapse. The nearly-universal productivity of the sigmatic aorist in Indo-European (plus the excellence of its name) encouraged me to derive a lot of Getic pasts from the sigmatic aorist.
Niûro nCora
Getic: longum Getico murmur in ore fuit
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