Re: Middle English Verbal Prefix i-

Hello!

On 3/13/06, Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:
> Middle English appears to have had a prefix i- which could appear before
> verbs. Some well known examples of this prefix in action are
>
> "Adam lay ibounden,
> Bounden in a bond..."
>
> "Miri it is while sommer ilast with flugeles song..."
>
> and most famously of all
>
> "Summer is icumen in,
> Lhude sing cuckoo!"
>
> What I can't discern from these examples is what the morpheme actually
> means. Given that all the examples above are from songs, I do have the (to
> my mind) somewhat unsatisfactory theory that it may be a poetic flourish.
> Can anyone shed more light on it?
It's probably related to the German prefix _ge-_ that is used to form
past participles (e.g. _gegeben_ "given", from _geben_ "to give";
_gebaut_ "built", from _bauen_ "to build")... German /g/ often
corresponds to English /j/ (e.g. Garten:yard, legen:lay). I'm not sure
about the details, though -- there must be some additional rules,
since German /g/ doesn't always correspond to English /j/ (cf. word
pairs like geben:give).

In any case, IIRC [1] the prefix started out as _ge-_ in Old English.
I assume that it was pronounced /ge/ or /g@/ or something like that...
Then the /g/ became /j/, and the vowel either changed to /i/ and
absorbed the /j/, or it was dropped and the /j/ became syllabic... In
any case, eventually the prefix became /i/, and then it went the way
of so many other unstressed inflectional affixes and disappeared
completely.

[1] From books I read a long time ago. I'm not old enough to remember
    the actual sound change. ;-)

I don't know, though, why the prefix occurs in some forms but not in
others (that also look like past participles to me). For example,
there's _ibounden_ in the first line of your first example, but
_bounden_ in the second line... Are your examples maybe from a time
when the prefix was already somewhat unstable? Or is my analysis
completely wrong and _bounden_ is not a past participle but something
entirely different?

Oh, and as for the meaning of the prefix: it seems to mean simply
"watch out, this is a past participle, not some other verb form as you
might think". ;-) I remember my confusion when I started learning
English and found that I had to deduce from context whether (for
example) "built" was a simple past form or a past participle, because
English doesn't have the conventient "hello-I'm-a-participle" prefix I
knew from German...

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)

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