Reconstruction talk:Proto-West Germanic/karēn

carian

Koebler says this root is the origin of Old English carian, rather than *karōnan. What do you think? Leasnam (talk) 21:44, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

It could be both, but it's hard to be sure without evidence from a language that kept the two distinct. I see that you listed karēn as an OHG descendant, but the other page also has karōn. I'm not sure how this worked out... perhaps these were two distinct verbs, or perhaps karōn is a northern form (coming from the area where weak class 3 was not preserved). The OHG evidence alone is not terribly conclusive in other words. But the Gothic evidence is definitely in favour of a class 2 weak verb, as there was no sign of any merging of the two classes in that language. So either OHG karēn is a new formation (which seems somewhat strange) or there were two verbs that happened to merge in a lot of the daughters. —CodeCat 22:14, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I think at least in German there was a merger, as the MHG word has the senses of both. I wonder too if the OE word ceorian might also have been influenced in form by ceorran (“to creak”), from Proto-Germanic *kerranan (“to creak”). Leasnam (talk) 22:25, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

The OE (deprecated template usage) carian also caries some senses (in addition to "to sorrow, grieve") of "to be caring, be interested, be concerned" which shows the *-ānan stem...this is correct for this stem?* Either way, I am okay with leaving it where it is now. Leasnam (talk) 22:28, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

• I think I have this confused with Proto-Germanic *-ēnan verbs? I do not see any byspels of such in the list. I vaguely remember discussing this with you briefly long ago. Leasnam (talk) 22:44, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

A possible -ēnan class doesn't really make any sense because there isn't actually any Germanic language that has an infinitive that can derive from -ēnan. ē becomes ā in West and North Germanic, while it stays ē in Gothic; and the third weak class is exactly the other way around (-an in Gothic, -ēn in OHG). In fact the only possible source of OHG ē is *ai, but that doesn't agree with Gothic. On the other hand, Gothic evidence makes it clear that at least some verb forms had -ai-, so when that became -ē- it's not so strange if it was extended to other forms to be parallel to -ō-, which is exactly what happened. There haven't really been many conclusive explanations of the third weak class, but so far Ringe's explanation is the most complete. He suggests a class of statives in -janan and a class of factitives (denominatives) in -ānan. The -ānan class was very small, presumably because there were already two other larger denominative classes, but I'm not sure whether this would be an -ānan verb because its meaning does seem to be stative in origin: 'to be worried'. If that's the case, then it would make the most sense to me that the original verb was *karjanan, and that *karōnan is a later formation derived from *karō.