earticle

영어

As Old English is seen to have evolved the Germanic principle with such consistency that virtually all its primary verbs came to be arranged in rigid ablaut series, traditionally OE strong verbs have been classified into seven classes according to the vocalism of their four principal parts, i. e., the present, the preterit singular, the preterit plural and the past participle. The most particular among the criteria for the classification is reduplication. The analysis of the so-called ‘reduplicating verbs’ has been such a slippery business that the origin of the OE preterite formation has been much disputed. The long-standing problem is approached by some linguists including Lehman. According to him, the OE reduplicating verbs and the Gothic counterparts have no genetic relationship within Germanic. Rather, he has attempted to explain these data with the 'mysterious' laryngeals. In other words, the Indo-European antecedents of OE past forms had once the laryngeal in the verbal stem which were later deleted after providing the conditioning for the changes. But by some reason this explanation has fallen into disfavor because of some shortcomings. On the other hand, Voyles have maintained that The OE verbs could be derived from originally reduplicating ones in Germanic. This involved a series of rules had been inherited from Indo-European into early Germanic. According to him, the change of stress has caused the formation of preterite forms in the North-West Germanic languages including OE while during Gothic period the change has never occurred and there was no feeding for the subsequent conditioned changes.