Re: Middle English Verbal Prefix i-

(BTW, I have a new email address in case anyone needs it. It makes it
clear what my name and country of origin are, and has a weird infix
that means I'm a person.)

On 13/03/06, Julia Schnecki Simon <helicula@...> wrote:

> 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 Old English, /g/ > /j/ basically before and after front unrounded
vowels, but not before back vowels. The "Old English phonology" page
on Wikipedia describes it in more detail if you're interested.

But in some dialects of Old English, especially the ones more strongly
influenced by the Norse dialects spoken by the Vikings after they
invaded, the palatisation was undone. As anyone who's tried to work
out why "bury" is spelt like that has no doubt worked out, Modern
English is the result of the combination of many dialects, and so
whereas "yard" comes from one dialect, "give" comes from another.
(There's also the problem that some words which look like authentic
English ones could be borrowings from the Norse dialects... "Give"
isn't one; it contains the Norse consonant, but the English vowel, but
there's others that are I think.)

> 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.
In fact, in Old English it was pronounced /j@/ or /je/. Old English
used <g> followed by a front vowel to spell /j/. That this was a
distinct phoneme, rather than an allophone of /g/ can be seen from the
existence of /j/ before /u/ and /o/ in words like "geong" /jung/ >
"young" or "geoc" /jok/ > "yoke" (yes! Even in Old English were things
spelt sillily!). This obviously come from Common West Germanic /j/. I
don't know if /@/ and /e/ were distinct phonemes, but I imagine the
vowel was already reduced by Old English...

> [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?
I think it was already optional in by Old English times. I can't
remember *why* I think that.

But also note that some other cases of an OE "ge-" prefix, which
represent a different morpheme, have remained, like "enough" which I
think turns up in German as "genug", which've retained it, so
obviously weakness didn't necessarily cause it to drop off.

> 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...
The uses of past participles seem too varied to me for a single prefix
to be useful :) At least, it can be used in conjunction with "to have"
to make a perfect, with "to be" or "to get" to make a passive and in
other cases to make an adjective. And others I can't recall just now.

(And in colloquial German, at least, don't you not bother with the
simple past form, preferring the present perfect? Does that make
non-ge-prefixed past-forms really rare in informal German?)

--
Tristan.

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