Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
CLE OF
PRODUC
TIVITY
Layers of productive verb
formation patterns in
Indo-European and Irish
Kandidatspeciale
Janus Bahs Jacquet
Dansk titel
Produktivitetens cyklus
Lag af produktive verbaldannelsesmønstre på indoeuropæisk og irsk
INTRODUCTION 5
Ter mino lo g y 9
1 Primary, secondary, and tertiary formations 11
2 Strong and weak inflections 15
3 ‘Productivity’ 18
3.1 Levels of productivity 19
3.2 Domains of productivity 21
3.3 Synchronic and diachronic productivity 23
3.4 A cyclical fluctuation of productivity 25
P rod ucti v i ty 2 9
INDO-EUROPEAN 33
1 The verbal system 33
1.1 Conjugational stems 34
1.2 The origin of the conjugational stems 40
1.3 A revised model of the verbal paradigm 43
2 Productive patterns 48
2.1 Form productivity 49
2.2 Tense productivity 51
2.3 Stem productivity 52
Root presents and aorists 54
Nasal presents 55
*-i̯e/o-presents 59
Simple thematic presents 61
2.4 Paradigmatic productivity 63
PROTO-CELTIC 67
1 From Indo-European to Proto-Celtic 68
2 Productive patterns 70
2.1 Stem productivity 71
The present stem 71
The subjunctive stem 73
The preterite stem 76
2.2 Form productivity 76
2.3 Paradigmatic productivity 78
INSULAR CELTIC 83
1 From Proto-Celtic to Insular Celtic 83
2 Productive patterns 85
2.1 Stem productivity 89
The preterite stem 89
The ‘neo-secondary’ endings 90
OLD IRISH 95
1 From Insular Celtic to Old Irish 95
1.1 Second lenition 96
1.2 Nasalisation 97
1.3 Vowel umlaut 98
1.4 Palatalisation 98
1.5 Syncope, apocope, and the rise of mutations 99
2 Productive patterns 100
2.1 Form productivity 101
2.2 Paradigmatic productivity 103
Conclusi on 1 0 9
DANSK RESUME 115
LITERATURE 117
INTRODUCTION
In this thesis, I will seek to go at least some way towards remedying that,
by giving what is, to the best of my knowledge, a pioneering attempt
6 at tracing the gradual and cyclical replacements and updatings of
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
7
Part 1
TERMI-
NOLOGY
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
dichotomy in its very title and fundament, starts out in the very first
line of its introduction by defining what primary verbs are in a most
rudimentary and vague fashion:
2 Due to the limited space available, the terminus of this study is Old Irish, but
It is abundantly clear from this that the notion of strength in Old Irish
verbal inflection is at best highly complex and quite hazy, and labelling
an entire Old Irish verb as one or the other is to some extent not very
useful, in my view; for this reason, I prefer to use the terms sparingly in
16 the present thesis as applied to entire verbal paradigms.
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3 This view entails that I basically follow the traditional definition of Ger-
manic strong and weak verbs, except that I see no reason for not including the
preterite-presents in the strong group — and of course that I prefer to view the
‘strong verbs’ as verbs that form one or more strong stems. 17
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3 ‘Productivity’
1 Moribund
Moribund categories display no productivity at all, in any form.
Suppletive paradigms are a good example of a moribund structure.
2 Stagnating
Categories with stagnating productivity occasionally display a cer-
tain amount of productivity, though normally only in very com-
pelling circumstances. Examples of stagnating structures could be
certain strong verbs in Germanic languages, such as English drive,
strive, thrive, etc., influencing previously weak, rhyming dive to
develop the strong past dove (earlier dived); or Danish cognates
rive, drive, trive(s), etc., influencing previously weak, rhyming
skrive to develop the strong past skrev.
3 Moderate
Moderately productivity those structures which are freely used by
speakers to create or adapt new forms, but which are in this regard
more or less equal in frequency to other similar structures with the
same function. In (late) Indo-European, I would regard *-i̯e/o- and
*-sk̂e/o-, of presumably roughly equal productivity, to be moder-
ately productive present stem formation patterns.
4 Prolific
Prolific productivity entails a structure being the default pro-
ductive pattern, eschewed only when compelling circumstances
condition the choice of another available option. It is the inverse
counterpart to stagnating and perhaps the most common level of
productivity. Where no compelling pressure (such as a group of
very homogeneous, rhyming strong verbs; see above) conditions
the choice of any other pattern, the prolifically productive pattern
20
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5 Mandatory
Mandatory productivity describes the situation when the produc-
tivity of a structure reaches the stage of unchecked spreading to
every corner of the system it can possibly reach, or when there is
synchronically no other option available at all to create new forms.
An example could be the spread of -t as the marker of the 3sg. in
Latin, both to originally secondary endings (replacing -d) and to
originally perfect ending (replacing, supposedly, -e)6, ending up as
the universal 3sg. marker present in every single form of every sin-
gle verb in the Latin language. Synchronically, new verbs in Latin
would acquire -t in the 3sg. by default, for the simple reason that
there
5 It may be argued that this pattern in English really lies somewhere between
moderate and prolific productivity at least in some areas. In verbal roots ending
in /iː/ followed by a labial, at least, the choice of past and pass. part. formation
is divided between the structure described here, and a semi-strong pattern that
substitutes /ɛ/ for the root vowel and suffixes /-t/ rather than /-d/, based on
verbs like sleep/slept and cleave/cleft.
6 If these had not already been reshaped throughout by the addition of
secondary -d < -t before the mandatory productivity of -t in Latin, that is.
7 I use ‘table’ here to refer to any distinct category in a verbal paradigm that
can be tabulated as a coherent unit distinct from other categories. For finite 21
The Cycle of Productivity
formations, this entails tabulation according to person and number; for non-fi-
nite formations, according to case and number. Thus in any given paradigm the
present indicative active is a table; the aorist subjunctive middle is a table; the
present active participle is a table; and the *-to-participle is a table. To avoid
ambiguity, I reserve the term paradigm to referring to the complete set of forms
of any given verb and thus do not speak of a ‘present paradigm’, but rather of a
dove, for example, has not been joined by analogous *diven simi-
lar to driven/thriven/striven; only the past tense enjoys stagnating
productivity.
Her final point here is crucial to the current study. While in general lin-
guistics, frequency and productivity should not be conflated, a study
such as this that deals to a great extent with prehistoric diachrony, with
very little possibility of ever attaining any kind of synchronic ‘snapshot’,
has access to no other indicator of productivity than frequency. As such,
when I discuss productivity in the chapters dealing with Proto-Indo-Eu-
ropean, Proto-Celtic, and Insular Celtic in particular, I am really discuss-
ing frequency more than actual productivity, and it makes little sense to
keep the two separate. In my treatment of the attested stages of Irish,
however, I shall attempt to keep the two concepts distinct.
26
Part 2
PRODUC-
TIVITY
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
9 I have left out the perfect, the causative-iteratives, and the intensives for
reasons of space and time. The perfect is formed in only one way and my main
focus is on the eventive stems, rather than the stative-resultative, so while
inclusion of the perfect could make some interesting statistical input available,
it is not vital. The intensive is not relevant to this study. 31
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follow, which makes the uncertain roots possibly even more significant
for my purposes in some respects.
32
INDO-EUROPEAN
So many different reconstructions exist for the verbal system of the Pro-
to-Indo-European language that it is almost a contradiction in terms to
refer to it as the verbal system of any language at all.
This study focuses on the development that led to the remarkable Old
Irish verbal system (again, the word ‘system’ feels here, if not exactly like
a contradiction in terms, then at least as somewhat of an exaggeration
when describing the Old Irish verb); however, a thorough description of
the structure — if not the forms — of the Indo-European verb must be
presented in some detail at first, in order to have a solid basis to begin
any further discussion from. I shall therefore devote some time to the
structural and semantic makeup of the Indo-European verbal system
before moving on to discussing actual productivity — a topic about
which it is much harder to say anything specific for the prehistoric
stages of the language.
There is, I think, universal consensus that the late Indo-European ver-
bal system distinguished person (first, second, third), number (singular,
dual, plural), voice (active, middle), mood (indicative, subjunctive,
optative, imperative), and tense, and comprised both finite and non-fi-
nite forms. It is also universally accepted that tenses were at the least
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the present, the imperfect, the aorist, and the perfect, though the exact
form and meaning of each of these is more contentious; that at least
three tense-stems (present, aorist, and perfect) formed the basis for the
formation of individual verb tables; and that different tables required
the use of different sets of personal endings, of which most accounts
distinguish four (primary, secondary, perfective, imperative). That
is, then, the very basic core of how the Indo-European verbal system
worked, as per scholarly consensus.
Going beyond this basic skeleton, consensus becomes quickly more
fragmented, the existence and, especially, structuring of different cate-
gories more contentious. Theories on how various formations interact
with or are related to one another abound, and even the shape and
interrelationship between the different personal endings have been
explained in enough different ways that hardly a single one enjoys com-
plete consensus.
It is therefore necessary, if any meaningful discussion of the Indo-Eu-
ropean verb both as a synchronic system and as part of a diachronic
evolution is to take place, to choose sides, as it were. I follow, in the
main, the verbal structure laid out in Fortson (2004: 81ff.) as being rea-
sonably well-attested, uncontroversial, and systematic. I shall refrain
entirely from touching upon various more controversial models of the
Indo-European verb, such as Jasanoff’s (2003) posited *-h2e-conjugation,
and devote only limited space to discussing competing, ‘mainstream’
models such as that adopted by Szemerényi (1990).
reconstructable for all roots. Fortson (2004: 81) sets up the following
relation between verb type and stem formation:
Not every verb could form all three tense-stems. Quite a few
did not form perfects, for example, and derived verbs only had
present stems in PIE.
10 Fortson separates causatives and iteratives based mainly on Vedic separate
forms like iterative patáyati vs. causative pātáyati. I do not consider these cases, 35
The Cycle of Productivity
which could easily arise at any time in Indo-Aryan based on differing outcomes
according to Brugmann’s law, sufficient to posit two separate categories in
Indo-European; thus, like Schulze-Thulin below, I consider the pattern *-o-éi̯e/o-
to be causative-iterative, having both meanings. I leave the matter of how one
suffix came to cover two so different semantic ranges to other treatments.
11 More precisely, they each involve only one suffix (with ablauting or
thematic/athematic variants) with one or two formations possible. The
causative-iteratives use the full-grade *-éi̯e/o- with the o-grade of the root, and
the zero-grade *-i̯e/o- with ablauting ‘Narten-grade’; the desideratives use the
athematic *-s- with ablauting full-/zero-grade, and the thematic *-sé/ó- with
i-reduplicated zero-grade of the root. If we count these as being essentially one
36 formation with subtypes, we end up with rather less than twenty formations for
the present stem, too; but we are still left with twelve.
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12 Of course, once the individual languages started restructuring their verbal
systems and forming both aorist and perfect stems secondarily to these ‘derived
verbs’, they do assume the mantle of full verbal paradigms; but this is demon-
strably a later development whose establishment can be seen outright in the
evolution from the oldest Rig Vedic on to Classical Sanskrit, for example. 37
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»» They are formed from a stem base that is built on a root by the
interaction of two processes: ablaut (either zero-grade, full-grade,
o-grade, or lengthened grade) and reduplication (unreduplicated,
e-reduplication, or i-reduplication).13
»» On the evidence of Vedic, they form all four moods, though caus-
ative-iterative optatives are very rare (MacDonell 1916: 195–207).14
All these properties are shared with another category of which we have
already seen examples: the present stem formations. In other words,
while it makes little to no sense to consider causative-iteratives, denom-
inatives, and desideratives ‘derived verbs’, it is structurally sound and
13 I will not touch upon the intensive and its peculiar type of reduplication
involving the first consonant of both onset and coda of the root. Søborg (2015)
has convincingly argued that the intensive is a secondary development, to be
ascribed to Indo-Iranian rather than Indo-European itself, and I consider it
largely irrelevant to this thesis.
14 Causative-iteratives and denominatives form optatives in Homeric Greek
as well, but since both these categories have become fully-fledged verb classes in
Homeric Greek and also freely form aorists, perfects, and futures, this is hardly
conclusive. The desiderative had itself become the future in Greek, of course,
38 but there is no reason that I am aware of to believe that this future’s ability to
form optatives is secondary and not inherited.
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The three verbal stems available to any Indo-European root have been
varyingly described as marking mainly tense (present, aorist, perfect)
or aspect (imperfective, perfective, stative/resultative), and they have
followingly been varyingly termed tense-stems (as by Fortson) or aspect
stems (as by Ringe). Some, like Fortson, view the stems as basically
aspectual, but still call them tense-stems, by dint of their ability to form
tenses rather than due to any correlation to actual tenses. I follow Fort-
son and most others in using the more traditional names for the stems
(present, aorist, perfect), though I do this only to be mainstream in at
least one aspect. My choice of terminology here should not be taken as
an indication that I believe the stems to essentially denote tense. It is
clear that, whatever its origin, by late Indo-European times the aorist
stem was firmly associated with the past and had gone from denoting
solely aspectual properties of the verbal action to denoting equally (if
not predominantly) temporal aspects; but it is equally clear that there
is nothing specifically temporal or even aspectual about causative or
desiderative formations. For this reason, I prefer to sidestep the issue
entirely and term the stems neither tense-stems nor aspect-stems, but
simply conjugational stems.
39
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Another way of viewing this state of affairs is that tense was only a con-
40 jugational category in the imperfect aspect, i.e., in the tables formed
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
Hoffmann (1970: 28ff.) notes that both present and aorist formations can
be formed with zero-suffixes (i.e., ∅, making root presents and aorists).
He takes this as an indicator that in a Pre-Indo-European stage, the two
must have been the same, and the preference for the zero-derived and
thus most basic formation must have been lexical, lying in the root itself
and its inherent Aktionsart. At such an (eventive–stative) stage of the
verbal system, the default and unmarked formation would be to simply
add the personal endings directly on to the root, the Aktionsart of the
root automatically providing the resulting surface form with an aspect
that was essentially, relative to Ringe’s term, internal structure–focused
(imperfective) or internal structure–agnostic (perfective).15 This is simi-
lar to the durative/non-durative Aktionsarten discernible in the English
simple past tense; durative ‘I slept’ vs. momentary ‘I fell’.
If we accept that any given root would at this stage develop a basic,
zero-derived table that was perfective if the root’s Aktionsart was per-
fective, and imperfective otherwise, then it seems unavoidable that the
attested non-zero-derived (i.e., suffixal) formations16 must be in the
first instance formations that somehow reversed the aspect of the base
15 I am leaving aside the stative aspect here. Ringe considers all three aspects
equal and considers *u̯ ói̯d-e a root with a stative Aktionsart, hence its unmarked
formation — unfortunately there are no other examples of roots with stative
Aktionsarten, and I find a single verb too sparse as evidence to base such a cat-
egory on. I prefer instead to view the perfect as an inherently marked form, and
the non-reduplication of *u̯ ói̯d-e to be secondarily reshaped from **u̯ e-u̯ ói̯d-e
by haplology, perhaps due to the frequency of that particular perfect. I therefore
reckon with only two Aktionsarten, focused and agnostic.
16 Meaning specifically formations with surface suffixes. I assume that root
formations, too, are underlyingly suffixal, but their suffix is a null morpheme not
visible in the surface form. 41
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17 In fact, the only exception appears to be the *s-based formation that later
became the s-aorist. Since this is only quite rudimentarily reflected in Hittite and
not fully in Tocharian either, we may assume that this is in fact a later innovation
42 that arose later than most of the imperfective formations; in this case, we may
even substitute “all of which” here.
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18 Going back even further, it seems likely that in the earlier binary even-
tive–stative system, the default aspect (or at least the one that formed the base
for productive innovations) was the eventive, and the stative was a more highly
marked, but also more inadequately preserved, relic of an erstwhile category.
The number of verbs for which a stative formation is reconstructible is far
lower than for the eventive stem types, and it is likely significant that the modal
distinctions appear not to have applied to the stative: there are no reconstructi-
ble perfect subjunctives or optatives. Since the Anatolian languages also display
no subjunctives or optatives, it is possible that these modal categories arose
in Ringe’s “North IE” and as neologisms applied only to the productive verbal
formation types, the eventive-based ones. 43
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The perfect stem had only its own peculiar endings, while the even-
tive-based stems had used the hic et nunc particle to develop extended
forms of the originally eventive endings, perversely traditionally called
primary endings, as opposed to the original, unaltered endings termed
secondary endings. Despite these absolutist terms, it seems sensible to
me to define their relationship to the two stems in term of markedness,
rather than (reversed) primacy, by keeping in mind that the extended
endings were originally created specifically for what was by this time
the present stem and were never intended directly for the aorist stem.
As such, it makes sense, when dealing synchronically with the late
Indo-European verbal system, to call the secondary endings unmarked
and the primary endings marked for the aorist stem; vice versa for the
present stem.
This ties in with the late-innovated imperfect tense as well. The
imperfect is built from the present stem, but is characterised by the
non-extended endings and the addition of the pastness marker *é-,
which characteristics combine to root it firmly in a time-plane, but
44 removing it from the present.
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19 It is perhaps noteworthy that the ‘dependent’ form in Modern Greek, sys-
tematically a present aorist, uses presential endings, rather than aorist endings. 45
Indicative
Stem Formation type Subjunctive Optative
Unmarked Marked
root
— amphikinetic (full-/zero-grade)
— acrodynamic (Narten)
Nasal
— infixed
— *-neu-/-nu- suffixed
— *-neH-/-nH- suffixed
*-i̯e/o-
— full-grade *-i̯e/o-
Reduplicated
— *e- (athematic) Simple present Simple imperfect Simple subjunctive Simple optative
— *i- (athematic)
— *i- (thematic)
Stative
— zero-grade *-éh1/h1- (fientive)
— zero-grade *-h1i̯é/ó- (essive) Stative present Stative imperfect Stative subjunctive Stative optative
— zero-grade root
— full-grade root
Desiderative
— full-/zero-grade *-s-
Desiderative present Desiderative subjunctive Desiderative optative
— reduplicated *-sé-/-ó-
— zero-grade compound *-s-i̯é/ó-
Root
Aorist S-aorist Aorist (preterite) Aorist subjunctive Aorist optative
(Thematic, reduplicated thematic)
Perfect Reduplicated o-grade Perfect
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20 If the development of the pastness marker *é-, which is only found in
Armenian, Phrygian, Greek, and Indo-Iranian, is in fact an innovation of a 47
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The perfect stem was formed by only one pattern; the aorist stem by
at least two (perhaps three or four) patterns with no discernible differ-
ence in meaning; and the present stem by no less than approximately
two dozen patterns, some of which display no discernible difference in
meaning, while others have specific semantic values.
Table 1 overleaf tabulates this system in what I hope is a meaningful
and self-explanatory way. Stem formation types are consolidated from
LIV2 and Ringe (2006).
2 Productive patterns
dialectal group and not reconstructible for Indo-European itself, the present
model would more accurately be a model of the Proto-Armeno-Graeo-Aryan
verb itself, which would then not distinguish the imperfect from the present
injunctive. It is my view that the augment was at least partly grammaticalised
in Indo-European itself, and that Greek preserves this stage most faithfully,
the grammaticalisation having gone further in Armenian and been completed
48 entirely in Indo-Iranian. For the opposing view, see Meier-Brügger (2003: 182,
with further literature).
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whenever this happened. Such was the productivity of this clear marker
that it tended very strongly to encroach upon perfect and middle forms
in various ways, through replacement or addition.
On the comparative evidence of Hittite, Celtic, and Indo-Iranian, the
2sg. middle ending can be reconstructed with reasonable certainty to
something like *-th2e(r) or *-th2o(r), with *-r being originally the mid-
dle version of the hic et nunc marker which in the active was *-i. Sihler
(1995: 471ff.) reconstructs *-th2o(r), considering *-o as the marker of the
middle inflection in general;21 Fortson (2004: 86) reconstructs *th2e(r)
and does not reckon with an actual marker of the middle voice.22 This
ending is directly attested most clearly in Hittite -tta-ri and in Old Irish
-ther (2sg. deponent in the weak verbs; cf. Strachan 1949: 36). It is less
clearly seen in the Vedic secondary middle ending -thās, whose long
vowel is of unknown origin, though possibly the long vowel in the 2du.
ending -(e)thām and its relation synchronically to the corresponding
active -tam is involved somehow. It seems likely, in any case, that the
additional -s is to be equated with the 2sg. active marker encroaching
upon the middle form.
A more thorough encroachment is seen in the Vedic active form -se (<
*-soi̯) and Greek -σοι, Gothic -za (< *-soi̯), Latin -re (later -ris, compare
also Old Latin -rvs) where the *s has completely replaced the *t(h2) to
become the sole marker of the 2sg. throughout the active (non-perfect)
paradigm. In the case of Latin -ris and Old Latin -rvs, this encroaching
*s eventually rhotacised to yield *r, whereupon the immense stability
of *s as a marker of the 2sg. revealed itself by attaching itself to the now
anomalous ending *-ro (< *-so, in Old Latin) or -re (in Classical Latin).23
21 Sihler (474) also argues that the middle hic et nunc marker may in fact have
been *-ri, rather than merely *-r. This would simplify things for the Hittite forms,
and it would make derivation of some Old Irish forms easier; but it would entail
more difficulty than *-r for most of the Old Irish deponent forms, and there are
other concomitant problems as well, for which see below.
22 He writes (86), “[t]his *-r is now generally thought to have been the primary
middle marker, corresponding to the *-i of the active”, but his meaning here
is obviously that *-r is the marker of the primary endings in the middle voice,
rather than it being the main mark of the middle voice itself.
50 23 These are probably two independent developments, since the Old Latin
addition happened before all unstressed, short, final vowels became -e. The
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Classical Latin development, on the other hand, postdates this development, but
precedes the raising of vowels in final syllables ending in *-s. Alternatively, the
encroaching *-s could have continued to be a clearly hypercorrect addition for
such a long time that sound changes had the time to occur ‘around it’, as it were. 51
The Cycle of Productivity
24 Going by the attested roots, *-de/o- and *-te/o- are in fact just one forma-
tion: *-te/o- is attested for two roots, both ending in *-ḱ, while *-de/o- is attested
for four roots, all ending in *-H. It seems obvious that the underlying form is
*-de/o- and that *-te/o- is merely due to voicing assimilation; I count them as
one in my corpus. It is notable that all four *-de/o- roots end in a laryngeal, and
tempting to suggest that *-dʰe- is also the same suffix. Such a postulate may be
possible, but I have not looked further into the matter, since this/these suffix(es)
are so peripheral and not relevant to this study. I will just note in passing that
there are quite a few laryngeal-final roots in the *-dʰe- group, as well. 53
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54
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25 I am agnostic to whether such reshapings would make the resulting forma-
tions primary or secondary. If the derived formant simply took the place of the
underlying zero morpheme from the underived formation, the result would be
a primary formation based on the root itself; if the derived formant was added
to the existing underived stem (with the zero morpheme), the result would be a
secondary formation based on a conjugational stem. Since both results would be
identical on the surface, I consider the point moot.
26 Examples include *trenk- attested in Insular Celtic, Germanic, and Baltic
(LIV2: 649; IEW: 1093–1094) and the homophonous pair *rei̯ǵ- and *rei̯⁽ǵ⁾- attested
in Old Irish, Middle High German, and Latin (LIV2: 503; IEW: 861–862). 55
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Wurzel mit Suffix -néu̯ /nu- interpretiert wurde” (LIV2: 18). Sihler (1995:
501f.) argues against this view as follows:
It must first be noted that Sihler is incorrect in stating that the nasal
infix type is “all but non-existent” in Hittite — it is, in fact, quite well-at-
tested, though it has also been refashioned to some extent there (see
Kloekhorst 2008: 152–155 for a reasonable attempt to align the Hittite
forms, which span both the ḫi- and the mi-conjugations, with the classi-
cal Indo-European infix). This does not mean, however, that his objec-
tions are unwarranted. Apart from *ḱleu̯ -, LIV2 lists 39 roots ending in
*-u̯ , but out of these, only three are attested with nasal infix presents, all
exclusively from Vedic and Greek.
Of the 52 roots attested with *-nu-presents, only 18 have a root shape
that makes the reanalysis of an originally triconsonantal root in full
grade II as a biconsonantal root with *-u̯ - as part of the suffix; of these
18, six are uncertain and four form two pairs of homophonous roots
(and *-nu-presents), leaving a total of only ten possible roots to form the
basis of the reanalysis of a nasal infix as a suffix: *dʰeu̯ -, *gʷʰer-, *h1ei̯,
*h2er- (two roots), *h3er-, *ḱen-, *kʷer-, *mei̯-, *per-, *seu̯ -, *ster-. The
branches who have yielded attested *nu-present forms for these roots
show forms for the following number of roots (given here as directly
continued forms / reshaped forms):
56
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› Indo-Iranian 10 / 0
› Greek 3/0
› Armenian 1/4
› Slavic 0/1
› Celtic 0/1
27 It is surely not irrelevant, either, that a few scattered Germanic forms of
*nu-presents are attested, through frequently reshaped, despite the fact that
*ḱleu̯ - is suspiciously absent from Germanic, too, the only non-Anatolian branch
not to have the root attested at all. 57
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been moderately productive for some time before Hittite split off, at
which point the nasal infix type lost its productivity in Hittite to the
*nu-formation, which conversely became prolifically productive (111
verbs listed in Kloekhorst 2008: 127f.). In Core Indo-European, *nu-for-
mations remained moderately productive (being associated especially
with roots ending in a sonorant, but growing beyond this original base
in later times), whereas nasal infix presents became prolifically produc-
tive for a time, almost rivalling the simple thematic formation pattern.
also, by all accounts, very frequent but are sadly considered ‘derived’ by
LIV2 and thus not listed or counted. Had they been counted, it seems
likely that *-i̯e/o-formations would make up a larger group than simple
thematic presents (if the ratio in Kloekhorst’s numbers below holds
outside Hittite).
Thus Sturtevant (1951: 122) states that already in Hittite “[d]enomi-
natives form the largest group of verbs with suffix iya” and Kloekhorst
(2008: 129) that “[t]his class is one of the most productive verbal class
in Hittite. In NS texts, almost all verbs show at least a few forms that
are inflected according to the -i̯e/a-class”. Kloekhorst divides the Hittite
verbs into three groups: original *-i̯e/o-presents (31 verbs), denomina-
tives (68 verbs), and verbs who took on -i̯e/a-inflection secondarily at a
later date (52).
For the Vedic material, Macdonell (1916: 205) numbers the denom-
inatives as “over a hundred” in the Rig Veda and “about fifty” in the
Atharva Veda. Kulikov (2012) includes later formations in Vedic, but
unfortunately categorises them by synchronic morphology rather
than semantics, thus conflating the semantically void presents and the
denominatives; he treats in great detail no less than 315 -ya-presents
(plus a selection of 27 post-Vedic formations).
In Greek and Latin, denominative*-i̯e/o-formations built on various
other present stem types form the basis of patterns (in Greek particu-
larly *-id-i̯e/o > -ίζω, in Latin particularly *-eh2-i̯e/o- > -ā-, i.e., the first
declension which eventually mad up nearly 80 % of late Latin verbs)
whose productivity can be classified as highly prolific, bordering on the
mandatory, subsuming verbs of many other formations into their class
types.
Even without going into details of other branches, who largely attest
to the inherited frequency, though not necessarily quite to the subse-
quent rampant productivity, the conclusion is surely unavoidable, based
on the combination of a large group of inherited forms and often even
larger groups of newer, innovated forms, that *-i̯e/o-presents (including
here denominatives) are the single Indo-European verbal formation
type that enjoyed the highest degree of stable productivity, both in the
proto-language and in many of the descendent daughter languages.
60
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
17 less than for the simple thematic present).28 But looking at the totals,
it is evident that the imperfective aspect — or rather, the present
stem — had taken over and become the default at some point before
the stage attested by LIV2. Adding up all present stem vs. aorist stem
formations, there are in my corpus of 1,149 LIV2 roots 1,093 (95.1 %) that
form a present stem, but only 580 (50.4 %) that form aorists.
The lateness of the *s-aorist is supported by the ratio of root vs. *s-ao-
rist (409 or 70.5 % vs. 177 or 30.5 %),29 but highly surprising is the fact
that in the present stems, the simple thematic present — which is as
late as, probably even later than,30 the *s-aorist — is massively domi-
nant, despite its lateness: out of the 1,149 roots that form presents, the
426 that form simple thematic presents make up 39 %, far outstripping
other patterns that were both older and still productive, like nasal pre-
sents (248 roots or 22.7 % without *-nu-presents; 300 roots or 27.4 %
with them) and *-i̯e/o-presents (189 roots or 17.3 % without the full-
grade type; 239 roots or 21.8 % with them; possibly more than simple
thematic presents if the number of denominatives were known and
could be added).
The only possible conclusion, which is hardly a surprise to anyone
familiar with the Indo-European verbal system, is that the simple the-
matic present appeared on the stage just before Tocharian split off and
then gained productivity with a completely unparallelled rapidness,
rushing forth in a burst of what must have been almost mandatory
productivity before losing its momentum, possibly even before the split
into daughter languages, and settling down to moderate productivity
until this too was gradually lost outside Greek.
28 If only certain formations are counted, there are in fact more root aorists
than simple thematic presents: 265 vs. 224.
29 This yields 101 %, which is due to the fact that four roots (*bʰer-, *ǵneh3-,
*h2u̯ es- (1), and *preḱ-) are listed as forming both a root and an *s-aorist.
30 Their relative ages are difficult to judge. The tentative first steps towards
the *s-aorist appear to be attested in both Hittite and Tocharian, whereas the
simple thematic present is only reflected in Tocharian; but conversely, the the-
matic presents attested in Tocharian reflect a fully functional thematic forma-
62 tion, whereas the beginnings of the *s-aorist reflected in Hittite and Tocharian
are only individual forms that had not yet spread to form a paradigm.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
The first thing to be noted ties in with the quote from Fortson (2004:81)
in 1.1 above that “[n]ot every verb could form all three tense-stems. Quite 63
The Cycle of Productivity
a few did not form perfects, for example”. While it is certainly clear that
many verbs did not form perfects — only 281 roots or 23.7 % of all the
roots in LIV2 are thus listed — the fact that (as per 2.3.4 above) only half
the listed roots form aorists at all has not generally been remarked upon.
Nor does it seem to have been noted that, of the 580 roots that form
aorist stems, 56 (9.6 %) do not form a present stem at all (the number
rises to 109 (19 %) if we narrow it down to the ‘big four’; see 2.3 above).
It is hardly surprising, given the identification of the traditionally
‘derived verbs’ as present stem formation types and the likelihood that
all other derived present stem formations once had semantic signifi-
cance, that there are many roots which form multiple present stems; no
less than 329 (30.1 % of the roots that form presents), in fact. Conversely,
it is a testament to the lack of any real semantic meaning underlying the
*s-aorist formation that only four roots form both aorist types.
Looking at the underived root formations on their own, we find an
anomaly: out of the 52 reconstructed Narten-type root presents, no less
than 24 (46.1 %) correspond to a root aorist. This is highly unexpected,
given that the corresponding ratio for ablauting root presents and root
aorists is 5 out of 152 (3.2 %). This was noted also by Kümmel (1998,
passim) who posited that Narten ablaut arose by ablaut ‘upgrading’, to
distinguish the present from the in many forms identical root aorist.31
Regardless, Narten presents are so few and clearly not productive that
this correspondence must have been noticeable, but hardly a template
for new formations synchronically.
Perhaps more likely to be a candidate for a productive correlation
is the fact that *-i̯e/o-presents too seem to unduly favour root aorists.
31 This theory ties in well with my proposed original primacy of the perfective
aspect —it would make sense to ‘upgrade’ the ablaut to a more highly marked
type in the more highly marked aspect — but it seems an oddly ad hoc way
for the speakers of Indo-European to get around this problem, considering
the number of other present stem formants available to them. One possible,
though hardly provable and possibly disprovable, solution would be to posit that
Narten presents are simply relicts of the very beginning of the Indo-European
verbal system, made when no other present stem formation was available, or at
least when all other present stem formations still retained their semantic value
64 and were thus not suitable. One might have expected a larger class of Narten
presents in such a case, though.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
While the overall size of the material is slighter for the *-i̯e/o-presents,
the percentile ratio between the root aorist and the *s-aorist are almost
exactly the same, both showing more than twice the average preference
for the root aorist. Keeping in mind that both nasal/*-i̯e/o-presents
and *s-aorists were found above to almost certainly have been highly
productive in late Indo-European, the fact that two productive pres-
ent stem formation types so clearly preferred the presumably, by late
Indo-European times, less productive root aorist is indicative of not just
one, but two productive patterns.
Having sifted through the statistical data for a wide array of stem forma-
tion types as reconstructed by LIV2, I have not found much to shake the
foundations of established notions about the structure of the Indo-Eu-
ropean verbal system. A few anomalies that I have not seen mentioned
before have stuck out, but no major correspondences that would justify
dividing the system into conjugational classes have presented them-
selves to me. I thus conclude that, despite some patterns in some fre-
quent formations, a large percentage of Indo-European roots formed
their conjugational stems in ways that were not obviously connected
32 Although it must be said that my numbers differ from Søborgs since I count
double forms; thus, he counts *teh2⁽ǵ⁾ as a reduplicated aorist only, whereas I
count it as both a root aorist and a reduplicated aorist. We both arrive at 248
nasal infix presents, but while Søborg counts 132 root aorists, 21 *s-aorists, 2
reduplicated aorists, and 93 with no aorist, I count 126 root aorists, 22 *s-aorists,
2 reduplicated aorists, and 101 with no aorist. Unlike Søborg, I include all three
types of nasal present and both types of *-i̯e/o-presents. 65
The Cycle of Productivity
and must, to a great extent, have been more or less arbitrary. Productive
stem formation patterns vied with one another, yielding a bewildering
labyrinth of stem combinations that cannot have been easy for the for-
eign speaker to acquire and master.
66
PROTO-CELTIC
68 retismus eingetreten war” for Gaulish and remains agnostic on Celtiberian and
Lepontic.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
a form does not appear in any of the Insular Celtic languages. Since the
Gaulish and Celtiberian forms match the future imperative in *-tō(d)
otherwise attested, it is probably safer to assume that it is inherited and
had become common (perhaps even productive) in Continental Celtic,
while stagnating and eventually disappearing altogether in the Insular
Celtic branch.
It seems to be almost entirely universal in Celtic that the subjunctive
had been dislodged from its position as a mood formed by the addition
of a mood marker to an eventive stem (present or aorist) to constitut-
ing instead its own basic stem, from which the present subjunctive was
formed (the aorist subjunctive being lost without a trace as a tense cat-
egory, though not as a formation type; see below).
There is little decisive evidence whether Proto-Celtic continued the
opposition of primary and secondary endings found in Indo-European
in the present stem: it has been argued by among others Cowgill (1975)
and McCone (1979, 1986, 1991) that Insular Celtic gave up the second-
ary endings and generalised the primary endings throughout, but the
Continental evidence is inconclusive. Celtiberian shows only seemingly
primary endings in -Ti (3sg.) and -nTi (3pl.), though the vagaries of the
Celtiberian script makes it difficult to say whether these reflect [-(n)ti]
or just [-(n)t]. Gaulish inscriptions contain both forms that look like
primary endings and forms that look like secondary endings, but these
are not distributed in any way that is relatable to the familiar Indo-Eu-
ropean system, and many of the primary-looking endings can also be
interpreted as containing a suffixed subject (or object) pronoun -i(d) ‘it’
(cf. e.g. DLG: 79 for buetid). Since a generalisation of primary endings
are required for Insular Celtic (see the chapter on Insular Celtic), the
most likely scenario is in my view that Proto-Celtic did generalise the
primary endings, and that a subsequent apocope caused *-i to be lost in
Gaulish (and possibly Celtiberian), in a way entirely parallel to — but
by necessity separate from — how things turned out in Insular Celtic
(see From Proto-Celtic to Insular Celtic on p. 83).
69
The Cycle of Productivity
2 Productive patterns
»» Present stems:
› simple thematic (73)
› athematic (6)
› *-i̯e/o- (22)
› *-sḱe/o- (4)
› *-ī- or *-īi̯e/o- < LIV2 type ‘Essivpräsens’, *-h1-i̯e/o- (5)
› nasal (45)
› *i-reduplicated (3)
»» Subjunctive stems
› root (3)
› *-(a)se/o- < aorist subjunctive; see below (109)
»» Future stems
› reduplicated *-se/o- < reduplicated desiderative (89)
34 The preterite passive stem, used only to form the passive participle (<
70 *-tó-participle) remains remarkably stable even in Old Irish and will only be
dealt with sporadically when relevant to the context.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
»» Preterite stems
› *-(a)s- and *-t- < *s-aorist (23)
› root (3)
› reduplicated < perfect (86)
35 There is evidence that roughly the same classes existed in British as in
Goidelic, but only the oldest layers of Breton reflect this with any kind of regu-
larity. In Old Welsh and Cornish, the classes were confused early on, no doubt
aided by the extensive apocope that removed most signs of the class-defining
vowel (Schrijver 2011: 57f.).
36 Presumably ueŕsoniTi in the Botorrita inscription — which has been gener-
ally accepted as a causative < *uper-sonh2-ei̯e-ti (thus Eska 1989: 116f.) or perhaps
*uper-dʰonh2-ei̯e-ti (thus LIV2: 144f., writing on p. 533 under *sonh2- that “Keltib.
„uersoniti“ ist dagegen als uerðoniti zu lesen und muß daher entfallen”) — would
72 fall into this class, but the lack of any other paradigmatic forms of this verb
makes it less than given.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
remaining 35, only four (*dʰei̯ǵʰ-, *gelH-, *sleu̯ k-, *u̯ ie̯ h1-) have no cog-
nates outside Celtic, which is hardly enough to warrant calling the type
productive.
37 Compare how in modern Spanish and Portuguese ir ‘go’ and ser ‘be’ most
peculiarly and irregularly share a preterite stem fo-/fu-. 73
The Cycle of Productivity
When the subjunctive became a stem of its own, the more highly
marked and uniform *s-aorist subjunctive was chosen over the inher-
ited system of a separate type of subjunctive built to each type of
present stem. The coalescence of all forms of *-(e)i̯e-(e)- in *-ī-,̆ the
generalisation of the zero-grade of the nasal infix, and the consistent
thematisation of forms wherever possible would in essence have caused
the subjunctive to be almost or entirely identical to the indicative in
the athematic presents, nasal presents, ‘strong’ *-i̯e/o-presents, and
‘weak’ *-ī- and *-ii̯e/o-presents, which we have already seen make up
a very large portion of the verbal inventory. The *s-aorist subjunctive,
on the other hand, would remain quite distinct with its *-s-e/o- marker.
Assuming that this took place after the development of interconso-
nantal laryngeals to *a, the result would in all laryngeal-final roots be a
sequence *-V-s-e/o-: for *Ceh1- roots, *-īse/o-; for *Ceh2- and *Ceh3- roots,
*-āse/o- (once *ā and *ō had coalesced as *ā); for *CeRH- roots, *-ase/o-.
This, incidentally, times the rise of the subjunctive stem quite pre-
cisely, since it assumes the following order of sound changes:
At the time this took place, the point of contact between root-final con-
sonants in *CeC roots and the *-s- of the aorist subjunctive presumably
had a limited effect, apart perhaps from voicing assimilation, which is
allophonic and automatic in the majority of the world’s languages. At
some point during Proto-Celtic, however, all non-dental consonants
38 I have argued elsewhere (Jacquet 2015: 7, arguing points raised by Griffith
2010: 44) that the loss of intervocalic *-i̯- in Celtic very likely happened in several
39 Note, however, the supposed 3sg. preterite form gabas (Châteaubleau tile
L-55; cf. Stifter 2009: 237ff.), which, if it is indeed a 3sg. preterite as it would seem,
would indicate that the change from *gax-s- to *gab-a-s- had already taken place
at the time. According to Stifter (2012: 160), the two texts are from approximately
the same period, around 100 AD. The reading and interpretation of gabas is more
secure than those of gabxps, so I remain hesistant that the Lezoux form does
indeed show a retained consonantal s-preterite, and prefer to think that Gaulish,
like Irish, regularised the verb into the *-a-group.
Additionally, the identification of forms like Gaulish gabas with Old Irish
gabais, -gab entails accepting a slight modification of the order in which sound
changes in Celtic took place. It is commonly agreed that the change *st > *ss
took place in Insular Celtic and did not occur in Continental Celtic, based on
examples like Celtiberian sistat on the rock inscription from Peñalba de Villastar
(MLH K.3.3) and the tentative identity of *-st- with Gaulish đđ and θθ in some
inscriptions. Schrijver (1994: 399–430) discusses the outcome of the cluster *st in
various positions in all branches of Celtic, conclusion in essence that Pro-
to-Celtic *-st- yields British *-ss-, while *-sst- yields *-st-. Mysteriously, though, he
completely fails to treat *st in absolute auslaut except by an indirect note on p.
409 under (10). I would suggest, based on the correspondence between the Irish
and the Gaulish formations, that in auslaut *-Vst in fact gave *-Vss already in
Proto-Celtic, while in anlaut and inlaut it remained and subsequently under-
went the various changes outlined by Schrijver. As Watkins (1962: 177) points out,
this was originally tentatively suggested by Thurneysen (GOI: 417), but it does
not seem to have been outright stated as a specifically Proto-Celtic development
since and is in fact actively denied by McCone (1996: 99) who apparently does
not consider the Gaulish forms in -as to be possible cognate forms and writes
that the *s-preterite “is so far unattested outside Insular Celtic”.
40 Jasanoff (1994) argues against this origin of the subjunctive, but is,
in my opinion, not very successful. His objections to the rise of the *-(a) 75
The Cycle of Productivity
76 (including claiming that the *s-aorist was a productive type in late Indo-Euro-
pean by referring to its lack of productivity in Tocharian).
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
41 This must have happened subsequent to the raising of *-ō in final syllables,
naturally, since we would expect *-āmi otherwise.
42 He suggests that reguccambion in the Chamelières inscription (L-100) may
contain a trace, segmenting it as regu-c cambion, with -c being an enclitic relic of
*éǵō. See also DLG (217): “le doublement du c n’est pas expliqué”. 77
The Cycle of Productivity
78
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
subjunctive stems by adding *-ā ̆se/o- to the present stem;43 and preter-
ite stems by suffixing *-s(e/o)- to it.44
How new verbs formed their future stem is difficult to say. Continen-
tal Celtic has several future forms, particularly from Gaulish, but only
one can be safely assumed to be a recent formation. Their formations
all appear to correspond to the future stem formations described in
2 above and appropriate to the inherited verbs, including marcosior,
which looks very clearly like a denominative (from marcos/-a ‘horse’,
cf. DLG: 171f.). Old Irish, conversely, forms reduplicated futures only
to inherited verbs, adding instead to new verbs a suffix of still hotly
debated and ultimately obscure origin.
I find McCone’s (1991: 176–182) reasons for believing the origin of this
suffix to lie in the relatively recent prehistory of Irish, rather than in
Proto- or Insular Celtic, generally attractive,45 but they sadly require
believing in a very long stage (from Proto-Celtic through Insular Celtic
and all the way up to the recent prehistory of Irish) where inherited
verbs (regardless of their conjugation) had a future tense, while new
verbs did not. This seems to me an altogether implausible scenario.
Typologically speaking, defective verbs are quite common, and nearly
all inflected languages have them to some extent or another. As far as I
46 This argument may additionally also be made for the traditional view of
the Indo-European verb, as cited from Fortson on p. 35 above, that such a
large group of formations as the statives, causative–iteratives, and desideratives
were in fact special classes of verbs that, due to their conjugational type alone
80 and irrespective of semantic motivation, could form only one out of the three
basic stems in the language.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
In brief, then, we may say that the Proto-Celtic verbal system grew out
of a complex and mostly unpredictable Indo-European one, beating,
for the most part, a profusion of more or less incompatible formations
based on semantic categories that were no longer recognised into a rea-
sonably sensible system which displaced most of these formations into
an admittedly large class of more or less irregular but non-productive
verbs, and built instead from their ashes a completely refashioned sys-
tem with a much higher degree of predictability, able to easily absorb
new formations.
81
INSULAR CELTIC
The verb that Insular Celtic inherited from Proto-Celtic was quite struc-
tured and simple, and to a great extent, its systematicity appears to have
been retained more or less unchanged through much of the history of
Insular Celtic. There are only really three major innovations in Insular
Celtic that effected — in the case of one of them, more aptly perhaps
afflicted — the verbal system as a whole.
One was the introduction of a new set of personal endings that, much
like their late Indo-European ancestors, signified non-presentiality and
The Cycle of Productivity
pastness and were thus used to form what became the present imperfect
(traditionally called the imperfect), the future imperfect (traditionally
called the conditional), and the preterite imperfect (traditionally called
the pluperfect and only extant in British, where peculiarly it has both
pluperfect and future meanings).
The second was the development of a *t-preterite to match the
*s-preterite for roots of certain makeups.
The third was the generalisation of a verb-initial word order and a
more or less semantically void particle in second place in every clause,
be the first element verb, preverb, or particle. Combined with the
far-reaching and tumultuous sound changes that beset Insular Celtic
and, especially, its descendants, this seemingly harmless addition con-
spired to create an entirely morphological and non-semantic, yet excru-
ciatingly complex and bewildering, distinction between absolute and
conjunct inflection in all verbs.
In addition, a few sound changes must be specifically dated as Insu-
lar Celtic which would have far-reaching consequences for the entire
grammatical system of the language and its descendants. It is likely
that intervocalic47 lenition of voiced plosives (and probably also /m/,
cf. McCone 1996: 84–87) was already a feature of Proto-Celtic, but evi-
dence from Continental Celtic makes it unlikely that it was more than
purely allophonic, as in Modern Spanish or Danish. Whether this leni-
tion in Proto-Celtic applied across boundaries (as in Spanish) or not
(as in Danish) is impossible to say due both to the limitations of the
Continental Celtic spelling systems and the unlikelihood of a purely
allophonic difference being written down in the first place, a compar-
ison Spanish with Spanish being once again highly apt. (See McCone
1996: 81–98 for a much more thorough description of the existence and
conditionings of intervocalic lenition in Proto- and Insular Celtic.)
47 I use this term in relation to Insular Celtic and its descendants as a
blanket term for the specific contexts that triggered allophonic lenition. As
in Spanish, inter-resonantal would probably be a more accurate term, though
(unlike Spanish) it seems lenition did not occur in the position after resonants
84 /j w r l n m/, only before them. Absolute word-final position most likely also
triggered lenition.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
2 Productive patterns
48 Actual absolute and conjunct inflection cannot have been a property of
Insular Celtic, as it is the direct result of apocopes that did not occur until after
the split into Goidelic and British. Nonetheless, since the climacteric changes
in sentence structure that conditioned the split into absolute and conjunct
inflection occurred in Insular Celtic, I will describe the whole concept here.
49 This is of course deliberately litotic. Such preverbal derivation is highly
productive in more or less all Indo-European languages, and there is no reason
to believe that its productivity does not date back to the proto-language itself,
though different branches and languages vary on how tightly knit the resulting
preverb–verb unit becomes. In Vedic, Avestan, and Homeric Greek, for example,
the first preverb is usually freely movable, resulting in tmesis; in the modern
Germanic languages, they are in some verbs movable to certain positions in
some contexts, but not in others; in the Insular Celtic languages, they were not 85
The Cycle of Productivity
more so than in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, the Insular Celts developed
an unparallelled predilection for exploiting preverbs to derive tertiary
verbs from existing ones: combinations with three preverbs to one
main verb are not uncommon, and four or even five are not unheard
of (see EIV: 1 for details). These are termed compound verbs, while their
non-preverbed counterparts are termed simplex verbs.
It has been recognised since the dawn of Celtology that Old Irish
and to a lesser extent also the British Celtic languages display a dis-
tinction in personal endings, using one set for simplex verbs that are
not governed by any preverbal element (including apart from preverbs
also the so-called conjunct particles, a description of whose Old Irish
realisations may be found in EIV, p. 1), and another set for verbs that
are governed by a preverbal element (including, thus, all compound
verbs). The endings used in the ungoverned forms of the verb tend to
be longer and more marked and are known as the absolute endings,
while the shorter (indeed often nonexistent) endings used with the
governed verb forms are known as conjunct endings. There is no trace of
any difference in meaning between the two endings: they are perfectly
automatic, depending only on the governedness of the verb. There is
often a great deal of similarity between the absolute and conjunct end-
ings, but they are rarely completely identical outside the forms formed
with the secondary endings (see 2.1 below), which make no distinction
between absolute and conjunct endings at all, and some forms of the
middle voice.
The origin of this peculiar distribution has of course been the topic
of much scholarly debate, and no conclusion has as yet been reached. I
shall briefly here sketch my own preferred hypothesis as I have argued it
elsewhere (Jacquet 2013: 18f.).
Kim McCone (1979) has argued that the road from an essentially SOV-
based sentence structure in Indo-European and Proto-Celtic to the VSO
structure found in the Insular Celtic languages arose essentially through
freely movable, but certain elements could intervene between preverb and verb;
and in the modern Romance and Celtic languages, as well as in many com-
86 pounds in the modern Germanic languages, they are entirely frozen in place,
fused with the main verb.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
Insular Celtic clause that did not already have an enclitic (like an object
pronoun), except in those rare instances where the archaic verb-final
order was employed. Mirroring the cliticisation of forms of the Latin
copula, the initial vowel in *eti was dropped if it collided with a vowel
in the preceding word. Towards the end of the Insular Celtic period,
an early apocope of final *-i occured after unvoiced stops. When the
inflected verb was followed by an enclitic, including *eti, it would now
end in the (generalised primary) personal ending + *t, i.e., in nearly all
cases *-it (1sg. present *-ūt); when the enclitic was attached to a gov-
erning element instead, that element would retain an additional *-(e)
t, and the inflected verb would be subject to the apocope and lose its
final *-i. Thus ungoverned *bereti-’ti > *bereti-t, but governed *to-’ti beret
> *to-t beret.
In the earliest history of Old Irish and the prehistory of British, both
branches underwent a series of dramatic and highly complex sound
changes which included raising of mid vowels before high vowels; the
development of palatalised allophones of all consonants (except /h/)
according to a highly complex pattern; a second wave of intervocalic
consonant lenition, this time affecting not only voiced stops, but also
unvoiced stops and sonorants; as well as a very extensive and ruthless
bout of syn- and apocope which eradicated any trace of final syllables
that did not end in *-V̄ h < *-V̄ s (or *-V̄ θ < *-V̄ t). In pretonic syllables in
Old Irish, additional erosion of the inherited morphophonemic mate-
rial occurred: vowels were savagely reduced or lost altogether, and
unvoiced plosives tended to be voiced. All this conspired to yield the
following highly simplified development of the absolute–conjunct
inflection split:
Proto-Celtic Insular Celtic Old Irish
ungoverned *ˈbereti > *ˈbereti-’ti > *ˈbereti-t > *ˈbereþi-h > *ˈberiþi > ˈberiþ ⟨berid⟩
governed *tū bereti > *tū-’ti ˈbereti > *tū-t ˈberet > *tū-h ˈberʹeh > *to-ˈberʹe > do-ˈberʹ ⟨do-beir⟩
88
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
The t-preterite (GOI 421-4, OIPG 63-4) is formed by all but one
(-ern, see 2.3) strong verb with root-final r or l, about a dozen
roots in all, the two strong roots (em-, sem-) with final -m and
basic short e, and a minority of strong verbs ending in a voiced
guttural stop or fricative usually written g
The origin of the *t-preterite had been the object of much research for
over a century before the solution was essentially found by Watkins
(1962: 156–174) who noted that the t- and s-preterites were in comple-
mentary distribution in the strong verb classes where they occur: t-pret-
erites occur only with roots ending in resonants (except n) and g; s-pret-
erites occur elsewhere. Combining this with the realisation that the
s-preterite itself goes back to a generalised 3sg. in *-ss and the accepted
etymology of Irish tart ‘thirst’ < Indo-European *tr̥ s-tó-, he surmised
that the t-preterite was in fact completely parallel to the s-preterite:
since *-s- disappeared between a resonant and t, the 3sg. form to use as
the basis for the tabular levelling ends up ending in *-Rt alone, and the
*-t is generalised to the other forms as a new preterite marker.
That this stem formation was productive is easy to ascertain: similar
to the *s-preterites, the *t-preterites dominate the strong classes of verbs
in Old Irish for roots that end in resonants (except n). In most cases,
this is regular and to be expected; but in those cases where the verbal
root goes back to an Indo-European laryngeal-final root, the *s-aorist
would originally have been of the shape *CeRə-s-t, which became
*CeRa-ss in Proto-Celtic and formed the basis for the *-ā ̆s(e/o)-preter-
ite. There are, however, some laryngeal-final roots that are only attested 89
The Cycle of Productivity
50 On whether the middle endings originated in the perfect endings (= origi-
nal stative) I remain agnostic. It seems to me likely, but ultimately, it is irrelevant
for current purposes. 91
The Cycle of Productivity
51 “Since only the personal endings distinguished the indicative (and the
desiderative) imperfect from the indicative (and desiderative) present in
Indo-European, this distinction must have vanished when the primary active
endings fell together with their secondary counterparts in Insular Celtic. The
difference between them must, however, have been preserved in the middle/
deponent inflection, and it can be seen that this distinctive imperfect inflection
then spread to the active imperfect (28.1). For that reason, the imperfect endings
have no special deponent forms. It seems, then, that the Old Irish imperfect
and conditional mood ultimately stem from the Indo-European indicative and
desiderative imperfect, respectively. The use of these imperfect endings spread
92 out to the subjunctive in Insular Celtic to form a past subjunctive next to the
present subjunctive of aorist origin which was there already.”
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
might indicate that the spread of these endings were a gradual, ongoing
process when the two branches split, though that is rather orthogonal to
whether they originally spread from one or two stems.
It seems that these three innovations constitute more or less the entirety
of what happened in the Insular Celtic period to upset the stable verbal
system inherited from Proto-Celtic. At the end of the period, thus, the
Insular Celtic verb must on the surface have looked quite a bit different
from its ancestor, due to the addition in varying locations in the verbal
complex of the Cowgill particle and (if this was not a Proto-Celtic devel-
opment) the lenition of intervocalic voiced plosives and *s.
The underlying tense formations and personal endings sans particle
remained, however, essentially unchanged, except for the addition
to the system of a *t-preterite and three new derived ‘neo-secondary’
tenses from the present, subjunctive, and future stems (and possibly a
burgeoning fourth one from the preterite stem).
93
OLD IRISH
Unlike the Proto-Celtic and Insular Celtic periods which were both
characterised by a phonetic stability and conservatism that, objectively
viewed, far exceeds that of Indo-Iranian, Greek, German, or Italic dur-
ing the same time frame, the periods that followed the split of Insular
Celtic into Goidelic and British was characterised by some of the most
extreme and dislodging sound changes attested in the Indo-European
languages, all of which happened over a suprisingly short span of time.
Amazingly, these changes, which rendered the vast majority of verbal
paradigms in Old Irish hopelessly complex and with only the vaguest
hint of predictability, seemingly did little to push the speakers of Old
Irish to adopt a strategy of comprehensive analogy to obtain a verbal
system with some semblance of regularity. The upshot was that the Old
Irish verbal system was, in a word, ridiculous.
1.2 Nasalisation
Concurrent with or subsequent to this second wave of lenition, clus-
ters consisting of nasal plus plosive (i.e., /t k kʷ b d ɡ/, since /p/ had
been lost /ɡʷ/ become /b/ in Proto-Celtic) were reduced to single ele-
ments. With unvoiced stops, the results was a voiced stop in Irish and an
unvoiced, aspirated nasal in British (or rather, Old Welsh); with voiced
stops, the result was a voiced nasal in both branches (in effect, the stop
was lost). The details of how this skewed outcome came about is as yet
unclear, both for Irish and perhaps less so for Welsh (cf. Hickey 1997: 8).
It is clear that Irish ⟨f⟩ < *u̯ was also affected by nasalisation and
became voiced /β/,52 but the development of how this came about is
not entirely clear. McCone seemingly believes that “[A]fter a voiced
consonant w became v” (1996: 120), which does not seem a very eco-
nomic view to take in view of the fact, pointed out by McCone (1994:
88) himself, that /w/ was maintained up until the time of syncope in the
attested history of Old Irish.53 It seems rather more economic to posit
that *u̯ remained unchanged /w/ except after unvoiced consonants
(where it was unvoiced to /w̥ /, merging entirely with a preceding /h/),
and at some point after the syncope assimilated to and merged with the
other bilabial series extant in the language, unrounded /ɸ β/ where it
had not been lost. Initial /ɸ/ was then generalised from the frequent
cases where it would have followed an erstwhile /h/ < *-s and regularly
have become /ɸ/, in order to avoid an unparallelled variation /β ~ ɸ/ of
a type found nowhere else in the language.
This provides a simple and clear explanation and must be preferred
to the trail of events seemingly espoused by McCone (1996). It must be
admitted that the version laid forth in McCone (1994) comes signifi-
cantly closer to this description than to McCone (1996).
52 I am of the firm opinion that Old Irish, like the earliest recorded and metic-
ulously described forms of Modern Irish, did not possess labiodentals /f v/, only
bilabial /ɸ β/, and I therefore use only these symbols to avoid misconceptions.
Occam’s Razor would all but demand this.
53 It is not clear to me whether McCone uses v as a shorthand for whatever
the precise pronunciation was, or whether he truly believes that *u̯ became a
labiodental /v/ after voiced consonants. 97
The Cycle of Productivity
1.4 Palatalisation
Old Irish maintains a very consistent and pervasive phonemic distinc-
tion between palatalised and non-palatalised consonants, which plays
a crucial role in both nominal and verbal morphology (the following is
mostly rephrased from McCone 1996: 115–120).
Palatalisation occurred in pre-Irish in three stages (1 to 3), and the
precise rules governing each are complex and depend on a finely poised
interaction between various different sound changes.
case labials and velars were not palatalised. B happened after rais-
ing. After the loss of final *-n and *-h, final *-e and *-i merged and
were shortened to a palatal schwa or glide *-i̯, which palatalised
any preceding consonant(s) except the cluster *cht, regardless of
stress or vowel quality.
2 Productive patterns
The complexity of the Old Irish verb after all these upending sound
changes had wreaked their havoc on the inventory must have been quite
sufficient for speakers to scramble for any kind of productive pattern
to apply to new words, of which Old Irish took in an awful lot at that
time, most from Latin. As will become clear, however, efforts like the
100 ones undertaken by their Proto-Celtic ancestors to regularise the verbal
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
system by utterly reshaping its very structure were apparently too dras-
tic for the Old Irish. Though diligent efforts were made to create possi-
ble patterns for the inclusion of derived and loan verbs, the structure of
the verb as it had looked before the above-mentioned sound changes
changed its form was adhered to as far as possible, and speakers sought
to create productive patterns by tweaking and exploiting existing fea-
tures in the language rather than by innovating new and getting rid of
old structures.
Since at least Insular Celtic times, it had been possible to form derived
verbs (in my framework tertiary derivations) by compounding words of
more or less any word class with the weak A II-class verb *sag-i- ‘seek
(out)’, and it was this pattern more than anything else that formed the
basis of an enormous group of derived verbs that entered into the A II
class themselves and ended up making up the majority of the class, reg-
ularising and simplifying its inflectional pattern in ways which no other
Old Irish verb did.
Apart from the *sag-i–compounds, however, little material was added
to or taken away from the structural basis of the verb, aside from the
creation of a distinction between deponent (< old middle) verbs and
true passives, and as both are fairly complex matters, I shall limit my
discussion of the Old Irish verb to them.
inflection in the present, and true passives, inflected only in the 3sg. and
3pl. in a manner that is very clearly based on the middle inflection also
(in the present; the preterite passive was built instead on the inherited
passive participle), but is nonetheless clearly distinguished from the
deponent forms of the same origin.
The origin of how the same inherited paradigm could yield two
always distinct forms has not been conclusively settled. McCone (1994:
143–145) discusses the origins of both the deponent inflection itself
(which is not straightforward either) and the distribution between
the 3sg./3pl. deponent and passive forms, setting up a highly complex
system of analogies back and forth between active and deponent, depo-
nent and (neo-)passive, absolute and conjunct, and verbal roots with a
different number of syllables that is perhaps logically unimpeachable,
but requires rather more constantly changing and interacting analogy
than I am comfortable believing could plausibly have occurred.54
Whatever the origin of the Irish passive, the distinction between it
and the deponents with which it shared so much of its makeup and
form became highly productive and formed the basis for the impersonal
forms still in frequent use today. Even more so, perhaps, the preterite
passive, being so easily and predictably formed from a form already
extant in the verbal paradigm, the passive participle.
The form of the past passive began as a copular sentence with the
copula elided, “X (is) Y’ed”, perhaps already in Proto-Celtic or at the very
least in Insular Celtic. Being adjectival in origin, the participle was of
course unable to express inflection for person by desinence, but it was
nonetheless at some point in Insular Celtic, if not earlier, reinterpreted
as a pseudo-active verbal form, enabling it to take object pronouns.
Unlike active absolute verbal forms, however, it could not take verb-suf-
fixal pronouns (see GOI: 270f.), but required the addition of a semanti-
cally void preverb in order to take infixed object pronouns if the verb
itself did not already have any preverbs; in Irish, this was no-, while in
Welsh, it was y (McCone 1994: 172).
54 Jasanoff has treated the subject too, in an article titled “An Italo-Celtic
102 isogloss: the 3 pl. mediopassive in *-ntro” (1997). Unfortunately this article has
been unavailable to me and is therefore not included here.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
Possibly this was the place in the paradigm that provided a spring-
board for the comparative use of the present passive with empty pre-
verbs (when needed) and infixed pronouns (thus McCone 1994: 143). In
any case, it can hardly be coincidental that both passive formations use
empty preverbs and infixed object pronouns to mark the grammatical
subject (semantic patient) of the passive.
In the ‘neo-passive’ present, which must still have been overtly recog-
nisable as a slightly deviant deponent-looking form, it would in theory
be conceivable to use verb-suffixal pronouns by following in the path
of the deponents and turning the deponent stem in *-(t)or- into *-(t)
i- and add the pronoun to that. There is a very good reason, however,
that this did not happen: since deponence was lexically decided and
deponent and active forms were in complementary distribution with
no verb having both, deponents were free to switch their deponent stem
for an active one when a suffixed pronoun was needed. This would not
(necessarily) be true of the passives, however, who could be formed on
both active and deponent verbs. Switching to an active form for the
purpose of pronoun suffixation would, in the case of active verbs, ren-
der the resulting form entirely identical with a 3sg. (or 3pl.) active form
with an object; i.e., “I am hit” would in practice become “He hits me”.
An alternative way of forming non-third-person forms without risking
this type of ambiguity would obviously be highly desirable, and the past
preterite would make a good starting point for one.
however, at least one new type of verb arose as a more clearly marked
derived formation: the *sag-i–formation, used in the main to form orig-
inally compound denominal and deadjectival tertiary verbal stems. The
semantics of the root *sag-i- ‘seek’ would imply that it was originally a
kind of neo-desiderative meaning ‘wishes for X’ or ‘actively seeks out
X’,55 but the actual attested evidence for such a meaning is slim and not
compelling. As is the case with the majority of present stem formations
in Indo-European, *-sag-i- had, by the time of the earliest attestations,
long since ceased to have any primary meaning and had become simply
a highly practical way to form derived verbs. In Old Irish and especially
Middle Irish, its use spreads like wildfire, to the detriment of *ā ̆- and
*ī-̆ verbs which remain moderately productive in Old Irish, but gradually
lose all productivity in later periods.56
In Old Irish, *sag-i–verbs are, strangely, deponent in the main, despite
the base verb saigid, -saig being active. Some examples of active inflec-
tion forms do exist even in the Würzburg and Milan glosses, and later on,
the deponent forms dwindle and disappear (not only in *-sag-i–verbs,
but in general); but there can be little doubt that they were originally
deponent. To my knowledge, no adequate explanation for this curious
fact has as yet been uncovered. Le Mair’s (2013: 63f.) somewhat cavalier
statement as to the semantic value of deponents in Old Irish in general
certainly does not stand up to scrutiny as regards *-sag-i–verbs (though,
to be fair, her statement is made in a thesis that excludes this group of
verbs for most purposes):
104 and this is now quickly becoming the default class of verbs for new additions to
enter.
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
This chapter has hopefully made the point that the Old Irish period,
(in)famous for its unusually complex and arcane verbal system, is in
fact in many ways a period characterised by a series of hesitant attempts
to add regularity back into a system that was quickly degenerating and
falling apart at the seams as a result of pressure put on it by the bedlam
of phonetic changes that had occurred in the language; but also one
106
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
107
Part 3
CONCLU-
SION
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
111
The Cycle of Productivity
In the same manner, sifting through the data and rooting out the facts
relevant to see the big lines regarding Insular Celtic forced a reevalua-
tion of the established preconceptions of it as a highly innovative and
especially phonetically quickly developing linguistic period. Contrary
to expectations, it emerged that Insular Celtic was a period of phonetic
stability when the sound changes that took place were trivial and rather
few in number. Morphologically, too, the only clear innovations were
the addition of the t-preterite and the emergence of a set of ‘neo-sec-
ondary’ non-presential personal endings. The biggest change to occur
in Insular Celtic was rather on a syntactic level, with the change from
underlyingly verb-final to quite strongly verb-initial clause structure
and the generalisation of a mandatory, but semantically null, particle in
the Wackernagel position.
Finally, in the last section, I have described in the Old Irish period a
conflicted linguistic period, where immense and cataclysmic sound
changes leading among other things to the phonemicisation of the ini-
tial consonant mutations conspired to create one of the most complex
112 and unpredictable verbal systems ever devised, but where attempts
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
to stem this flow towards verbal anarchy, while manifold, fell short of
causing a complete systematic breakdown like the one that occurred
in Proto-Celtic. Rather, the measures taken to endeavour to maintain a
workable system worked on a smaller scale and included instead many
smaller, individual analogies and reworkings.
My goal with this thesis has been to see the language from a bird’s-eye
view, as it were, and focus on the large-scale eddies and fluctuations
that are constantly occurring in every single language on earth, slowly
shaping and moulding the burgeoning state of its future, rather than
focus on the minutiae that frequently end up being the focus of much
scholarship in historical linguistics.
In order to gain an overall view of the Irish language and how it has
vacillated and developed through time, I have focused on regularities
and patterns that may be carefully picked out from underneath the
debris of outdated theories, aspersed models, and discredited readings
that can so easily come to clutter and weigh down upon the fact the
object of our research was in fact living, evolving, and most of all used
languages, as full of regular and irregular patterns as the English we
speak today. I have distanced myself somewhat and kept in check my
historical linguist’s desire to enter into the fray and disappear under
a cover of dialect forms, phonetic correspondences, and finely tuned
sound laws. I have sought instead to gain and present a broad vision 113
The Cycle of Productivity
114
DANSK RESUME
116
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