Germanic preterite (was: Suppletory forms)

At 12:24 pm -0500 19/2/99, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
>> In the spoken German of the south (and, I believe, Austria) this form,
>> which was originally a perfect,  is now used as a preterite, the "official"
>> preterite being reserved there for the literary language.
>
>I believe this has spread to all German-speaking areas now.
You may well be right.  Nearly all my Germanic contacts have come from the
south.

Indeed, I believe this is the case in colloquial Dutch also and IIRC the
simple preterite has disappeared entirely from Afrikaans.

I have some vague recollection about suggesting a similar system in
Folkspraak, thus abolishing the preterite entirely; but I don't think it
was well received  :)

Ray.