The Cycle of Productivity: Layers of Productive Verb Formation Patterns in Indo-European and Irish

THE CY
CLE OF
PRODUC
TIVITY
Layers of productive verb
formation patterns in
Indo-European and Irish
Kandidatspeciale
Janus Bahs Jacquet
INSTITUT FOR NORDISKE STUDIER OG SPROGVIDENSKAB

DET HUMANISTISKE FAKULTET
KØBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
The Cycle of Productivity
Layers of productive verb formation patterns
in Indo-European and Irish
Kandidatspeciale af Janus Bahs Jacquet

Afleveret 2. juni 2015
Institut for Nordiske Studier og Sprogvidenskab

Det Humanistiske Fakultet
Københavns Universitet
Dansk titel
Produktivitetens cyklus
Lag af produktive verbaldannelsesmønstre på indoeuropæisk og irsk
INTRODUCTION 5
Ter mino lo g y 9
1 Primary, secondary, and tertiary formations 11
2 Strong and weak inflections 15
3 ‘Productivity’ 18
3.1 Levels of productivity 19
3.2 Domains of productivity 21
3.3 Synchronic and diachronic productivity 23
3.4 A cyclical fluctuation of productivity 25
P rod ucti v i ty 2 9
INDO-EUROPEAN 33
1 The verbal system 33
1.1 Conjugational stems 34
1.2 The origin of the conjugational stems 40
1.3 A revised model of the verbal paradigm 43
2 Productive patterns 48
2.1 Form productivity 49
2.2 Tense productivity 51
2.3 Stem productivity 52
Root presents and aorists 54
Nasal presents 55
*-i̯e/o-presents 59
Simple thematic presents 61
2.4 Paradigmatic productivity 63
PROTO-CELTIC 67
1 From Indo-European to Proto-Celtic 68
The present stem 71
The subjunctive stem 73
The preterite stem 76
INSULAR CELTIC 83
1 From Proto-Celtic to Insular Celtic 83
The preterite stem 89
The ‘neo-secondary’ endings 90
OLD IRISH 95
1 From Insular Celtic to Old Irish 95
1.1 Second lenition 96
1.2 Nasalisation 97
1.3 Vowel umlaut 98
1.4 Palatalisation 98
1.5 Syncope, apocope, and the rise of mutations 99
Conclusi on 1 0 9
DANSK RESUME 115
LITERATURE 117
INTRODUCTION
It is in the nature of speech and communication that every natural lan-

guage must have a way to enrich and enlarge itself: a way of adding new
content, new words, new forms to the language. Given the structural
basis of language, it is also a given that such new material must some-
how be made to fit into the structure of the language it is added to.
In languages that possess inflection as a morphological category, this
means that there must be a way to enable new content to fit into the
existing inflectional patterns, to apply established inflections to new
words entering or being formed in the language at any given stage.
Most languages display a complex multitude of more or less transpar-
ent strategies to achieve this goal. Theoretically, any inflectional pattern
extant in the language at the time new material enters it could be used
as a template from which to form a fully fledged and flexibly usable lex-
eme from the material in question. In practice, this is far from the case:
some patterns are clearly superior to others in forming templates from
which to create new lexemes.
This spectrum along which this superiority or inferiority is determined
is what is known as productivity. The more likely a given inflectional
pattern is to be used as the basis upon which new words and paradigms
are built, the more productive it is.
The field of historical, comparative linguistics in general, Indo-Euro-

pean linguistics in particular, aims to uncover ever earlier, prehistoric
layers of languages that are frequently long extinct, commonly through
comparison of such productive patterns with stagnant ones within the
same language (internal comparison) and comparison of both larger
sets of features and individual cognate forms and patterns in other,
related languages (external comparison). It stands to reason, then, that
what is most interesting for a comparative linguist is that which repre-

sents the oldest layers of a given language — the elements that are most
likely to reflect earlier stages of the language, prove genetic kinship to
other languages, and enable us to delve further into the prehistory of
the language. Newer material that has joined the language later on can
be useful for various purposes, but are by their very nature less essential
to the field.
Combining these two notions, comparative linguistics have, by and
large, tended to focus on the non-productive, stagnant, moribund for-
mation patterns and words in most languages: these are, after all, much
less likely to be newcomers in the language. This morphological bias
can be illustrated by a few very common terminological dichotomies set
up to distinguish between the two extremes in the productivity spec-
trum: opaque, irregular, moribund forms and patterns are considered to
be strong and primary, while transparent, regular, productive forms and
patterns are relegated to the undeniably decidedly inferior nomencla-
ture weak and secondary.
From a purely historical perspective, this is of course not entirely
unjustified — historical anteriority is notionally all but identical with
primacy, if not exactly with strength — but it is nonetheless the reverse
of how most native speakers of a given language intuitively categorise
inflectional patterns. In a purely synchronic view, the regular and trans-
parent comes first and is primary and strong, while the opaque excep-
tions are secondary and less important.
The bias against productivity is understandable, but a shame none-
theless, since it entails that there are plentiful systems and patterns
scattered around, in both attested and prehistoric languages, which
have received almost no attention and remain almost entirely unknown
to us.
In this thesis, I will seek to go at least some way towards remedying that,
by giving what is, to the best of my knowledge, a pioneering attempt
6 at tracing the gradual and cyclical replacements and updatings of
THE CYCLE OF PRODUCTIVITY
productive verb formation patterns throughout the history of the Irish

language, dating from (late) Proto-Indo-European approximately half a
decamillennium ago to the Old Irish language attested in inscriptions
and manuscripts in the early middle ages.
My main motivation in doing so is a firm belief that any given stage,
historic or prehistoric, of a language can and must be viewed as a syn-
chronic unit just as much as a diachronic one. It is easy to lose sight,
when buccaneering through linguistic (pre)history in search of more
or less obscure nuggets of preserved antiquity, of the fact that even the
obscurest and most scantly attested languages were once fully func-
tioning natural ways of communication with fully fledged paradigms,
regular and irregular, and that the regular and productive patterns
undoubtedly far outnumbered the archaisms and curios which occupy
such a disproportionate amount of our attention.
In this thesis, I shall be dealing simultaneously with various differ-
ent, but frequently overlapping, aspects of verbal morphology, and I
shall begin by devoting some time to establishing a consistent and, it
is my hope, clear terminological system upon which to frame my fur-
ther exposition. The following and main part of the thesis is divided
into four chronological layers of the Irish language: Proto-Indo-Euro-
pean, Proto-Celtic, Insular Celtic, and Old Irish. Of these, the primary
emphasis shall be on the Indo-European and Old Irish layers, not only
because they are the most turbulent and troublesome ones, but also
because they all mark a kind of turnstile, as it were. Indo-European is
the turnstile that marks the beginning of our path — the setting up of
all needed data the reader must be familiar with to move on. And Old
Irish — including here to some degree Early Middle Irish — marks the
turnstile between a language still not fully understood despite being
well-attested, and a post-Gutenberg language so well-attested that a
survey of its verbal system is more the job of a grammarian than a his-
torical linguist.
7
Part 1
TERMI-
NOLOGY
The nature of this thesis necessitates a lot of discussion about different

types of verbal morphology structures, many of which overlap to some
extent. A stringent and consistent terminology is therefore called for, to
avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding.
In the main, ambiguity and misunderstanding is particularly possi-
ble when distinguishing between the verbal categories of strong/weak
vs. primary/secondary vs. productive/non-productive. All three of these
dimensions in verbal morphology have special meaning, but have been
used loosely by various authors to refer to overlapping notions.
The following are the definitions I will adhere to in the present thesis.
1 Primary, secondary, and tertiary

formations
One fundamental distinction often drawn when attempting to catego-

rise verbs and their inflections is the dichotomy of primary verbs (or
formations) on the one hand and secondary verbs (or formations) on the
other.
Various different accounts and definitions have been given of what
precisely constitutes a primary verb, but most seem to agree on what
defines a secondary one: a secondary verb is any verb that is not a pri-
mary verb. This is of course quite circular in nature, but as long as we
are dealing purely with a dichotomy, and as long as primary verbs are
well-defined, it makes sense as a definition. Unfortunately, many sources
do not go into much detail about what exactly, for their purposes, the
definition of a primary verb is: they are usually defined in vague terms,
if at all, or based on other, equally ill-defined and vague terms. Thus, for
example, Stefan Schumacher’s mighty tome Die keltischen Primärverben
(Schumacher 2004; henceforth known as KPV), which presupposes this 11
dichotomy in its very title and fundament, starts out in the very first
line of its introduction by defining what primary verbs are in a most
rudimentary and vague fashion:
Gegenstand dieser Arbeit sind die Primärverben oder ‘starken

Verben’ der keltischen Sprachen. Ausgangspunkt der Arbeit
sind die urindogermanischen Wurzeln und Primärstammbil-
dungen, wie sie im Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben
(LIV2) zum ersten Mal umfassend dargestellt sind. Es soll hier
dokumentiert werden, wie die Primärverben des Urkeltischen
aus den urindogermanischen Wurzeln und ihren Primär-
stammbildungen hervorgegangen sind und wie sie sich dann
zu den Verbalformen weiterentwickelt haben, die wir in den
schriftlichen Zeugnissen des Keltiberischen, des Lepontischen,
des Gallischen, des Altirischen und der britannischen Sprachen
(Kymrisch, Bretonisch, Kornisch) finden. (KPV: 15)
Schumacher thus defines what constitutes a primary verb by equalling

it to a ‘strong verb’ — a concept that has quite different meanings when
applied to different languages — without defining what a strong verb is
at all. It goes without saying that I find this a rather cavalier and insuffi-
cient definition. For my definitions of strong and weak verbs, see Strong
and weak inflections below.
For the present thesis, I shall base my definition of verbal primacy
roughly on the definition laid out in Esther Le Mair’s 2011 PhD disserta-
tion Secondary verbs in Old Irish: a comparative–historical study of pat-
terns of verbal derivation in the Old Irish Glosses, based on the primacy
status of verbs relative to Old Irish specifically:
The essential difference is that primary verbs are derived from a

verbal root, whereas secondary verbs are derived from an exist-
ing verb, noun or adjective. Therefore, Old Irish primary verbs
will have been verbs already in Proto-Indo-European, whereas
Old Irish secondary verbs may have been derived within any of
12 the language phases between Proto-Indo- European and Old

Irish. (Le Mair 2011: 27)
Le Mair’s simple definition goes a long way towards arriving at an unam-

biguous and structurally sound differentiation between primary and
secondary verbs, though it seems oddly limiting to include word class
as an inherent part of the definition itself. A more generic and — in my
view — useful definition goes beyond verbs and distinguishes instead
formations, rather than words or verbs as such. Also note that I agree
with Le Mair’s wording (though it may not be her actual intent) that
there is a difference between underived formations (formed directly
from the stem without deriving) and derived formations (whether pri-
mary or otherwise). Further, it seems relevant to me to distinguish at
least two subtypes of non-primary formations, yielding the following
hierarchy:
»» Underived formations are those which are formed directly to a

root (i.e., a non-surface form that cannot at the time of deriva-
tion be further analysed into transparent parts) with no means of
derivation intervening. This corresponds in Indo-European to root
formations.1
»» Derived formations are those which are formed to a root through

ablaut, reduplication, or affixation. There are three levels of
derived formations:
› Primary formations are derived directly from the root (e.g., a stative
in *-eh1-).
› Secondary formations are derived from synchronically primary
formations (e.g., a *-i̯e/o- present from a stative, yielding an
*-eh1-i̯e/o- stative).
› Tertiary formations are derived from synchronically secondary (or
tertiary) formations (e.g., an abstract *-ti- noun formed to a second-
ary *-eh1-i̯e/o- present). I consider formations derived in various
other manners, such as compounding (including with preverbs,
1 On a deeper level, I actually consider such forms to contain a derivational

zero morpheme, but since this never shows up on the surface and there is good
reason to believe it was perceived differently from all other formations, I choose
to ignore it here and treat these formations as simply displaying no (overt)
derivation at all. 13
though this may also be thought of as affixation) to be tertiary, as

well.
In many cases, my definition of primary formations will tally with Le

Mair’s definition of primary verbs, but not always. Le Mair considers
root presents/aorists to be primary, for example, while I consider them
to be underived; and I consider *eh1-i̯e/o- statives to be compound and
thus secondary, whereas Le Mair considers them to be a single, primary
formation type.
As should hopefully be obvious from the above, it is of the utmost
importance that my definition of primacy is inherently and unambig-
uously synchronic. That is, an Old Irish verb that Le Mair (and Schu-
macher) would classify as secondary because it is in Indo-European a
denominative, may well in my view be classified as primary instead,
if the denominative derivation is no longer clear in Old Irish and the
base of the word no longer analysable as anything but a root. This very
fundamental difference becomes especially important when discussing
Middle and, in particular, Modern Irish, where the bewildering varia-
tion in form found in the majority of secondary and even tertiary verbs
(as well, of course, as in primary verbs) collapses entirely, and a host
of new, unanalysable roots emerge to form Middle and Modern Irish
primary verbs.2
Primacy is thus a very abstract, non-morphological, and purely der-
ivational notion, spanning on the one hand different word classes and
on the other different inflectional patterns. Most importantly, and this
in particular where many scholars seem to muddle and confuse matters,
it is orthogonal to word class and inflectional patterns. It is a property
of derivation as a process, not of entire resulting paradigms or individ-
ual inflected forms; a given verb is not limited to one level of primacy,
nor must any primacy it displays correlate in any way to how its various
stems or forms are derived. In this respect in particular, my definition
deviates sharply from Schumacher’s quoted above: I view strength
2 Due to the limited space available, the terminus of this study is Old Irish, but
14 the terminological and theoretical framework it builds upon should of course be

well-suited to discuss Middle and Modern Irish as well.
(strong/weak) as purely a morphological, inflectional dimension, and

Schumacher’s equation between primacy and strength would be com-
paring apples to oranges in my framework.
2 Strong and weak inflections
This leads me neatly on to defining what in my view should be consid-

ered the deciding factors when assigning values of strength to a verb.
As noted, I view strength as an inherently morphological, inflection
dimension; that is, it is a property of the conjugation of any given verb
as a whole, or of any individual formation within that conjugation that
fits the definition as well.
The notion of strong verbs and weak verbs is common to the descrip-
tions of many different languages and branches of languages. The
notion frequently involves distinguishing at least some of the same
parameters, but there are many differences in how the terms are applied
to different kinds of verbs between different languages. The Wikipedia
article on strong inflection expresses this terminological vacillation
quite succinctly:
A strong inflection is a system of verb conjugation or noun/

adjective declension which can be contrasted with an alter-
native system in the same language, which is then known as
a weak inflection. The term strong was coined with reference
to the Germanic verb, but has since been used of other phe-
nomena in these and other languages, which may or may not
be analogous. Note that there is nothing objectively “strong”
about a strong form; the term is only meaningful in opposition
to “weak” as a means of distinguishing paradigms within a sin-
gle language. Nor is there any distinguishing feature common 15
to all strong forms, except that they are always counterpoints to

“weak” ones. (Wikipedia: Strong inflection)
When describing verbs in Germanic languages, for example, it is cus-

tomary to term strong verbs such verbs as change the form of the vowel
in the verbal root in different forms of their conjugation, unless they be
of the type that form their present tense through the use of erstwhile
preterite forms, the so-called preterite-present verbs.
When discussing Celtic verbs, in particular Old Irish verbs, it should
be obvious that this definition is woefully inadequate: the Old Irish ver-
bal paradigm is so riddled with the effects of several rounds of syncope
and apocope as well as several types of vowel raising and lowering that
there is hardly a single verbal paradigm in the language that does not
change its root vowel several times over when conjugated.
As applied to Old Irish verbs in specific, Kim McCone in The Early
Irish Verb (McCone 1997; henceforth EIV) lays out the following rough
definition:
Strong verbs show considerable inflectional diversity and are

best defined for present purposes as having a 3sg. pres. act. conj.
that invariably ends in a consonant and is identical with the
corresponding 2sg. ipv. […]. With very few exceptions, moreo-
ver, strong verbs do not form an f-future or an s-preterite, and
no individual strong verb conforms to the weak norm of having
both of these types of future and preterite. The roots of strong
verbs frequently undergo considerable alteration from one
inflectional stem to another, as in 3sg. pres. guidid/-guid, pret.
act. (-)gáid, pret. pass. gessae/-gess, fut. gigis/-gig, subj. geis/-gé
or pres. canaid/-cain, pret. act. (-)cechain, pret.pass. cétae/-cét,
fut. cechnaid/-cechna, subj. canaid/-cana. (EIV: 24)
It is abundantly clear from this that the notion of strength in Old Irish
verbal inflection is at best highly complex and quite hazy, and labelling
an entire Old Irish verb as one or the other is to some extent not very
useful, in my view; for this reason, I prefer to use the terms sparingly in
16 the present thesis as applied to entire verbal paradigms.
It is undeniable, however, that there is a distinction in inflectional

stem formation: some include the root “undergo[ing] considerable
alteration”, while others do not — though the resulting inflectional stem
is of course still liable to the decimating effects of syncope, apocope,
raising, and lowering. My preferred definition of strength as it applies
to Old Irish verbs in particular thus differs from, as far as I know, all
previous such definitions in that it defines not entire verbal paradigms,
but rather individual stem formations. As it applies to stem formation,
I define strength along the same terms as McCone above: a present
stem is strong if the 3sg. pres. act. conj. form ends in a consonant and is
identical with the corresponding 2sg. ipv., weak otherwise; other stems
are strong if their formation entails what I will follow McCone’s lead
in weakly defining as “considerable alteration” from the present stem,
weak if they do not. As applied to entire verbal paradigms, strength is
thus a relative notion: a paradigm may be either entirely weak or strong
if all its stems agree in strength, but equally as common, it falls some-
where in between, some stems being formed in a strong manner, others
in a weak manner.
The definition of strength as it applies to the present stem, naturally,
only applies to Old and, to some extent, Middle Irish; but the funda-
mental notion that strength is a property not of the paradigm, but of
individual stem formations within the paradigm applies equally well
to any stage of any inflecting language in which the concept of ‘stem’
applies at all. What constitutes “considerable alteration” of course dif-
fers from one language to another: in Proto-Indo-European, for instance,
ablaut is a regular and systematic form of root alteration and does not
in itself warrant the label strong, whereas in the modern Germanic
languages, the remnants of ablaut have become characterised patterns
that are nonetheless more highly marked than the default of non-ab-
laut, and therefore do warrant being labelled as strong.3 In other words,
the underlying definition of strength remains immutable as applied to
3 This view entails that I basically follow the traditional definition of Ger-
manic strong and weak verbs, except that I see no reason for not including the
preterite-presents in the strong group — and of course that I prefer to view the
‘strong verbs’ as verbs that form one or more strong stems. 17
different languages, but the actual categorising of concrete stem forma-

tions depends on language-dependent variables.4
There is frequently a correspondence between paradigmatic strength
and productivity. A stem formation that requires little change to the
shape of the verbal root itself is almost always preferable when creat-
ing templates upon which to base new paradigms (or reshapings of old
ones), and weak formations therefore usually, though not always, end
up being the most productive.
3 ‘Productivity’
It seems to be almost universally accepted, though never outright

stated, within the field of historical linguistics that productivity is not a
binary opposition, but a gradual scale. It is very common to read expres-
sions such as “highly productive” or “marginal productivity” in scholarly
work, and these vague terms are generally sufficient for the incidental
description of an individual instance of productivity mentioned in
passing in works which, in the spirit of historical linguistics mentioned
and lamented in the introduction to this thesis, focus on quite different
matters and frequently only mention productivity in order to justify
discounting its resulting forms from their treatment. Since productivity
lies at the very crux of this thesis, however, I feel it incumbent upon me
to define this scale in more detail than simply implying its existence.
4 Note that suppletion always, irrespective of language, counts not as a “con-

siderable alteration” of the stem, but as a complete replacement of it. As such,
I do not count suppletive stems as strong, but as completely irregular. Unlike
strength, which is ill-suited to refer to entire paradigms, I have no qualms about
18 categorising any verbal paradigm that forms a suppletive or otherwise irregular

stem as being irregular in its entirety.
Although self-evident, the fact must be admitted up front that pro-

ductivity is not a precisely measurable or quantifiable notion; there is
no SI unit of verbal productivity upon which to base oneself. It follows,
therefore, that any graduation one applies to productivity must by
definition be non-standard. I am unaware of any previous attempts to
define a grade of productivity for historical, comparative linguistics spe-
cifically, though several such attempts have been made for synchronic
linguistic analysis, especially in English (see Schröder 2011: 25–61, espe-
cially 33–40, with a plethora of further literature). Many of the criteria
upon which the synchronic descriptions have been based are, alas,
unavailable to the historical linguist who deals at the best of times with
imperfectly attested languages without living native speakers, and the
worst of times with theoretically reconstructed proto-languages about
whose productivity patterns we may only surmise in the most general
sense.
As such, it seems hardly productive in a work such as this to adopt any
particular synchronic theoretical framework of describing productivity
and try to force what can be gleaned from (pre-)historical material into
such a framework. I shall therefore in large part leave the discussion of
what productivity is to synchronic linguistics, and instead focus on the
different degrees of productivity found in all languages.
3.1 Levels of productivity

Productivity has various been claimed to be a qualitative — i.e.,
binary — and a quantitative concept, whether described as essentially
a ternary opposition of productive – semi-productive – non-productive or
a continuous scale (Schröder 2011: 32). In line with Schröder, I adopt the
latter view, that productivity is an entirely continuous scale that can to a
certain extent be quantified relatively. Entirely continuous scales sadly
have the downside that they are by their very definition both infinite
and indefinite, which makes them rather unwieldy as measuring gauges.
While I believe a ternary opposition to be rather too limited to describe 19
productivity, I have compromised for the present study on the following

ordering, comprising five levels of productivity:
1 Moribund
Moribund categories display no productivity at all, in any form.
Suppletive paradigms are a good example of a moribund structure.
2 Stagnating
Categories with stagnating productivity occasionally display a cer-
tain amount of productivity, though normally only in very com-
pelling circumstances. Examples of stagnating structures could be
certain strong verbs in Germanic languages, such as English drive,
strive, thrive, etc., influencing previously weak, rhyming dive to
develop the strong past dove (earlier dived); or Danish cognates
rive, drive, trive(s), etc., influencing previously weak, rhyming
skrive to develop the strong past skrev.
3 Moderate
Moderately productivity those structures which are freely used by
speakers to create or adapt new forms, but which are in this regard
more or less equal in frequency to other similar structures with the
same function. In (late) Indo-European, I would regard *-i̯e/o- and
*-sk̂e/o-, of presumably roughly equal productivity, to be moder-
ately productive present stem formation patterns.
4 Prolific
Prolific productivity entails a structure being the default pro-
ductive pattern, eschewed only when compelling circumstances
condition the choice of another available option. It is the inverse
counterpart to stagnating and perhaps the most common level of
productivity. Where no compelling pressure (such as a group of
very homogeneous, rhyming strong verbs; see above) conditions
the choice of any other pattern, the prolifically productive pattern
20
of paradigmatic productivity (see below) in English is to form 3sg.

pres. in /-z/, past and pass. part. in /-d/.5
5 Mandatory
Mandatory productivity describes the situation when the produc-
tivity of a structure reaches the stage of unchecked spreading to
every corner of the system it can possibly reach, or when there is
synchronically no other option available at all to create new forms.
An example could be the spread of -t as the marker of the 3sg. in
Latin, both to originally secondary endings (replacing -d) and to
originally perfect ending (replacing, supposedly, -e)6, ending up as
the universal 3sg. marker present in every single form of every sin-
gle verb in the Latin language. Synchronically, new verbs in Latin
would acquire -t in the 3sg. by default, for the simple reason that
there
3.2 Domains of productivity

It must be noted that compared to primacy (which applies individually
to every derivation) and strength (which applies primarily to individual
stem formations), productivity is a much more flexible and many-faced
concept to deal with. It can apply equally well to entire ‘interfaces’ (that
is, the combination of particular stem formations to form a specific
class of paradigm), to individual stem formations, to individual table7
5 It may be argued that this pattern in English really lies somewhere between
moderate and prolific productivity at least in some areas. In verbal roots ending
in /iː/ followed by a labial, at least, the choice of past and pass. part. formation
is divided between the structure described here, and a semi-strong pattern that
substitutes /ɛ/ for the root vowel and suffixes /-t/ rather than /-d/, based on
verbs like sleep/slept and cleave/cleft.
6 If these had not already been reshaped throughout by the addition of
secondary -d < -t before the mandatory productivity of -t in Latin, that is.
7 I use ‘table’ here to refer to any distinct category in a verbal paradigm that
can be tabulated as a coherent unit distinct from other categories. For finite 21
formations within a stem, or even to individual forms within a given

tense. I shall attempt to consistently keep these four domains of pro-
ductivity separate in this thesis and deal with them seperately. For the
purpose of uniformity, I label them as follows:
»» Paradigmatic productivity refers to the relative productivity that

an entire verbal paradigm enjoys in a given stage of a given lan-
guage. This domain corresponds roughly to what is traditionally
called verb ‘classes’ or ‘conjugations’. The prototypical ‘regular’
first conjugation in Latin, for example, is a good example of par-
adigmatic productivity, where the combination of present stem
-ā-, future stem -āb-, perfect stem -āv-, passive participle stem
-āt- forms a simple and coherent frame for new verbs to be based
upon.
»» Stem productivity refers to the productivity enjoyed by any par-

ticular manner of forming a stem within a verbal paradigm. The
rampant and nearly unchecked spread of s as the marker of the
aorist stem throughout the history of Greek, to the point where
Modern Greek knows no other way of forming the aorist stem (cf.
Adams 1987: 56–57), is an example of stem productivity.
»» Tense productivity is the productivity of a particular type of

tense formation within a given stem. An example of stagnating
tense productivity is the recent one in English described in the
section on stagnating productivity on p. 20, which has yielded
such past tenses as dove from dive. Tense productivity can be part
and parcel of paradigmatic productivity, but need not be so; thus
formations, this entails tabulation according to person and number; for non-fi-
nite formations, according to case and number. Thus in any given paradigm the
present indicative active is a table; the aorist subjunctive middle is a table; the
present active participle is a table; and the *-to-participle is a table. To avoid
ambiguity, I reserve the term paradigm to referring to the complete set of forms
of any given verb and thus do not speak of a ‘present paradigm’, but rather of a
22 ‘present table’. Similarly, what is frequently termed paradigmatic levelling is in

my terminology called tabular levelling.
dove, for example, has not been joined by analogous *diven simi-
lar to driven/thriven/striven; only the past tense enjoys stagnating
productivity.
»» Form productivity refers to the productivity of any individual

form over other, similar forms. This can further be divided into
interparadigmatic and intraparadigmatic subtypes, the latter
being itself divisible into intertabular and intratabular. Inter-
paradigmatic productivity is when a given form in one paradigm
supplants or affects the corresponding form in different para-
digms (for example athematic *-mi being added to thematic *-ō in
Indo-Iranian, the present marker *-i being added to perfect forms
in Italic, or the restitution in Greek of intervocalic 2g. *s (after *s
> *h intervocalically) from forms where the *s was post-consonan-
tal). Intraparadigmatic productivity is when a form supplants or
affects another form in the same paradigm; this is intertabular
when the forms are in separate tables in the paradigm (e.g., the
*b-initial forms of ‘be’ in West Germanic intruding into the origi-
nally vowel-initial forms, yielding orms such as Old High German
bim), or intratabular when they are in the same table (e.g., the 3sg.
active supplanting the 3du. and 3pl. in the Baltic verb; see among
others Schmalstieg 1998: 471f. and Fortson 2004: 381 for this curi-
ous development).
3.3 Synchronic and diachronic productivity

It must also be noted that productivity for the present purposes can,
indeed must, be defined both in synchronic and diachronic terms,
yielding slightly differing concepts. Where synchronic productivity can,
by definition, only possibly relate to a given structure’s level of active
productivity in a particular moment, as employed by the speakers of
the language at that moment (the more literal and central meaning of
23
productivity), diachronic productivity frequently, though not uniquely,8

describes a process whereby a given structure’s level of productivity
changes, increasing or decreasing. The results of diachronic productivity
can by and large be equated with frequency, a property firmly rooted in
synchrony and much easier to measure. Productivity and frequency are
closely intertwined, but they are not identical; Pounder (2000: 134–135)
succinctly sums up their relationship as follows:
The word “productivity” is often used synonymously with “fre-

quency” and has even sometimes been so defined. However, the
former concept refers to the dynamic aspect of word-formation,
namely to operations, and the latter to its static aspect, namely
to attested forms in the lexicon, so that such a usage is mislead-
ing. This is not to say that there exists no relationship between
the two, of course. It is difficult to measure the intuitive notion
of productivity of an operation, so that one often relies on the
relative share of attested units in the lexicon for a given base
type, especially in historical investigations. Frequency can be a
symptom of productivity, since it is a result or consequence of it
if an operation has been productive for some time. However, it
bears no direct chronological relation to productivity. […]
Therefore, frequency can only be an imprecise indicator of

productivity. However, diachronically speaking, an increase
in frequency may serve as a reliable indication of increasing
productivity, as may a decrease indicate a relative decline of
productivity. Finally, from a practical perspective, there are few
other indicators of productivity in diachronic work, so here at
least one ends up relying on frequencies, as far as they are deter-
minable, whether one likes it or not.
8 It is possible for a structure to remain at the same level of productivity

over a long period of time; the -d-based past and past participle formations in
24 Germanic, for example, have remained prolifically productive as the primary,

though not sole, verbal formation pattern for the better part of two millennia.
Her final point here is crucial to the current study. While in general lin-
guistics, frequency and productivity should not be conflated, a study
such as this that deals to a great extent with prehistoric diachrony, with
very little possibility of ever attaining any kind of synchronic ‘snapshot’,
has access to no other indicator of productivity than frequency. As such,
when I discuss productivity in the chapters dealing with Proto-Indo-Eu-
ropean, Proto-Celtic, and Insular Celtic in particular, I am really discuss-
ing frequency more than actual productivity, and it makes little sense to
keep the two separate. In my treatment of the attested stages of Irish,
however, I shall attempt to keep the two concepts distinct.
3.4 A cyclical fluctuation of productivity

The interaction between a diachronic ebb and flow of this kind, the
ever-evolving increase and decrease of the productivity of various
elements and patterns, inevitably leads to a constant fluctuation in
what we may call the consolidated corpus of a language’s productive
patterns and structures. Focusing on individual structures or patterns
diachronically will yield an insight into the development of the very
building blocks of a language over time, as they are invented, become
productive, stagnate, and are eventually replaced by newer inventions
experiencing the same cycle.
This recursive fluctuation is in many ways similar to Jespersen’s Cycle,
first noted by Otto Jespersen, though not named after him until 1979,
with this succinct introduction to his book Negation in English and
Other Languages:
The history of negative expressions in various languages makes

us witness the following curious fluctuation: the original nega-
tive adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and there-
fore strengthened, generally through some additional word,
and this in turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then
25
in the course of time be subject to the same development as the

original word. (Jespersen 1917: 4)
In Jespersen’s honour, I have decided to call this diachronic fluctuation

in productivity — and this thesis — the cycle of productivity.
What remains now, after this rather lengthy foray into terminology, is
to attempt to arrive at as much of the details in the cycle of productivity
which has led from the (late) Proto-Indo-European to the current state
of affairs in modern-day Irish.
26
Part 2
PRODUC-
TIVITY
Part 2 is organised chronologically, starting with Proto-Indo-European,

going through Proto-Celtic and Insular Celtic, and ending with Old Irish.
In each chapter, I will give excerptive examples of which structures and
elements gained or lost productivity during each stage. Each chapter
starts off with a general overview of the verbal system attested in the
currently described stage and, where applicable, the major structural
changes to the verbal system (or, in the case of Old Irish, the phonetic
system) as a whole that led to it from the previously described stage.
Following this, the remainder of each chapter deals separately with the
four domains of productivity outlined in Domains of productivity on p.
21, sometimes leaving out one or two domains for reasons of space.
In order to gain some semblance of a corpus of data with which to
work, I have extracted from LIV2 an overview of those roots which are
attested with a present, aorist, or desiderative formation. For these 1,149
roots (accounting for 97.2 % of the 1,182 roots included in LIV2), I have
schematised all attested present, aorist, and desiderative formations.9
In addition, I have noted and categorised all Celtic stem formations
to these roots given in KPV (extracted from the indices — note that
KPV only covers ‘strong’ formations, so a-futures and f-futures are not
included, though a-subjunctives are included in s-subjunctives).
Since my goal here is not to accurately depict a frozen-in-time snap-
shot of the Indo-European Ursprache as she was spoken, but rather to
document which patterns, available to speakers of (late) Indo-European,
went on to become productive beyond the lifespan of the itself, I have
included those roots listed in LIV2 as uncertain (preceded by a ques-
tion mark). The most frequent significance of LIV2’s decision to mark a
root as uncertain for the proto-language is that it is only attested from a
single branch, and it is therefore not certain that the root itself existed
in the proto-language; the verbal formations based on such roots still,
however, follow the same principles that certain Indo-European roots
9 I have left out the perfect, the causative-iteratives, and the intensives for
reasons of space and time. The perfect is formed in only one way and my main
focus is on the eventive stems, rather than the stative-resultative, so while
inclusion of the perfect could make some interesting statistical input available,
it is not vital. The intensive is not relevant to this study. 31
follow, which makes the uncertain roots possibly even more significant
for my purposes in some respects.
32
INDO-EUROPEAN
So many different reconstructions exist for the verbal system of the Pro-
to-Indo-European language that it is almost a contradiction in terms to
refer to it as the verbal system of any language at all.
This study focuses on the development that led to the remarkable Old
Irish verbal system (again, the word ‘system’ feels here, if not exactly like
a contradiction in terms, then at least as somewhat of an exaggeration
when describing the Old Irish verb); however, a thorough description of
the structure — if not the forms — of the Indo-European verb must be
presented in some detail at first, in order to have a solid basis to begin
any further discussion from. I shall therefore devote some time to the
structural and semantic makeup of the Indo-European verbal system
before moving on to discussing actual productivity — a topic about
which it is much harder to say anything specific for the prehistoric
stages of the language.
1 The verbal system
There is, I think, universal consensus that the late Indo-European ver-
bal system distinguished person (first, second, third), number (singular,
dual, plural), voice (active, middle), mood (indicative, subjunctive,
optative, imperative), and tense, and comprised both finite and non-fi-
nite forms. It is also universally accepted that tenses were at the least
the present, the imperfect, the aorist, and the perfect, though the exact
form and meaning of each of these is more contentious; that at least
three tense-stems (present, aorist, and perfect) formed the basis for the
formation of individual verb tables; and that different tables required
the use of different sets of personal endings, of which most accounts
distinguish four (primary, secondary, perfective, imperative). That
is, then, the very basic core of how the Indo-European verbal system
worked, as per scholarly consensus.
Going beyond this basic skeleton, consensus becomes quickly more
fragmented, the existence and, especially, structuring of different cate-
gories more contentious. Theories on how various formations interact
with or are related to one another abound, and even the shape and
interrelationship between the different personal endings have been
explained in enough different ways that hardly a single one enjoys com-
plete consensus.
It is therefore necessary, if any meaningful discussion of the Indo-Eu-
ropean verb both as a synchronic system and as part of a diachronic
evolution is to take place, to choose sides, as it were. I follow, in the
main, the verbal structure laid out in Fortson (2004: 81ff.) as being rea-
sonably well-attested, uncontroversial, and systematic. I shall refrain
entirely from touching upon various more controversial models of the
Indo-European verb, such as Jasanoff’s (2003) posited *-h2e-conjugation,
and devote only limited space to discussing competing, ‘mainstream’
models such as that adopted by Szemerényi (1990).
1.1 Conjugational stems

In the traditional view, each Indo-European verbal base had the poten-
tial to form three different types of stems, called by Fortson tense-stems:
present stems, aorist stems, and perfect stems. The first two of these
had various subtypes, while the latter had only one pattern. As far as
we can tell, the potential to form any of these stems and their subtypes
34 did not necessarily entail an actual formation, and no stem type is
reconstructable for all roots. Fortson (2004: 81) sets up the following
relation between verb type and stem formation:
[I]n one group of verbs, called primary verbs, the tense-stems

were formed directly from the root. In another group, called
derived verbs, the tense-stems were created secondarily by
means of productive suffixes to express particular types of
action or shades of meaning. These verbs included causatives,
iteratives, desideratives, and denominatives. […]
Not every verb could form all three tense-stems. Quite a few
did not form perfects, for example, and derived verbs only had
present stems in PIE.
Since my definition of primacy differs from Fortson’s, his primary verbs

and secondary verbs are obviously not meaningful designations within
my framework: while there are no underived ‘secondary verbs’, his ‘pri-
mary verb’ category contains both underived, primary, and secondary
derivations in my framework. The basis for separating Indo-European
verbs into a ‘primary’ and a ‘secondary’ group is, in fact, non-existent in
my view. There is no systematic reason that I can think of to consider
a derivation like *sod-éi̯e-ti to be any less primary than a formation like
*gʷm̥ -sḱé-ti or *gʷm̥ -i̯é-ti, which Fortson would count as ‘primary verbs’.
Both types are built simply from an ablauting form of the root itself
through the suffixation of a derivational suffix, and only the implicitly
assumed difference that the former only forms a present stem differen-
tiates them, which is rather begging the question. I thus see no subjec-
tive motivation for terming these formations ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’,
respectively: as with all other formations, their primacy depends on
whether their derivational base is derived.
I fully accept, however, the basic tenet that causative-iteratives,10
desideratives, and denominatives do not form aorist or perfect stems,
which is well borne out by the earliest attested forms.
10 Fortson separates causatives and iteratives based mainly on Vedic separate
forms like iterative patáyati vs. causative pātáyati. I do not consider these cases, 35
Unlike Fortson (and others with him, e.g., Schulze-Thulin 2001: 2,

Ringe 2006: 34), however, I see no reason to consider the ‘derived verbs’
separate verbal paradigms, derived from ‘primary verbs’ in any way.
Indeed, apart from quantifying their inability to form aorist and perfect
stems, categorising them as separate paradigms carries absolutely no
advantage that I can see, but entails a host of rather insurmountable
questions and problems. Note that I say quantifying this inability, since
categorising the them as separate paradigms does absolutely nothing
towards actually explaining why they do not form aorist and perfect
stems when all other verbal paradigms do — it merely states that they
do not.
Calling them ‘derived’ paradigms that only form present stems also
does not explain the discrepancy between the multifarious present
stem types exhibited by ‘primary verbs’ and the one-to-one correspond-
ence between ‘derived verb’ type and present stem. That is, where any
‘primary verb’ (= any verbal root) has the potential to form no less than
twenty different types of present stem according to LIV2 (14–20), of
which some are naturally more common than others, the three types
of ‘derived verbs’ each have only one or two possible stem formations.11
Finally, the semantic arguments given for classifying them as separate
verbs are hardly convincing:
Ein -o-éi̯e-Verbum ist gegenüber dem e-stufigen Grundverbum

semantisch differenziert, e. g. griech. σοβέω ‘scheuche weg’
which could easily arise at any time in Indo-Aryan based on differing outcomes
according to Brugmann’s law, sufficient to posit two separate categories in
Indo-European; thus, like Schulze-Thulin below, I consider the pattern *-o-éi̯e/o-
to be causative-iterative, having both meanings. I leave the matter of how one
suffix came to cover two so different semantic ranges to other treatments.
11 More precisely, they each involve only one suffix (with ablauting or
thematic/athematic variants) with one or two formations possible. The
causative-iteratives use the full-grade *-éi̯e/o- with the o-grade of the root, and
the zero-grade *-i̯e/o- with ablauting ‘Narten-grade’; the desideratives use the
athematic *-s- with ablauting full-/zero-grade, and the thematic *-sé/ó- with
i-reduplicated zero-grade of the root. If we count these as being essentially one
36 formation with subtypes, we end up with rather less than twenty formations for
the present stem, too; but we are still left with twelve.
zu σέβομαι ‘sich scheuen’ ← ‘vermeiden’ […]. (Schulze-Thulin

2001: 2)
For earlier stages of Indo-European, and also in part synchronically in

late Indo-European, the *-sḱe/o- present stem formant has been various
interpreted, among other possibilities, as signifying essentially an itera-
tive-durative aspect (Kuryłowicz 1964: 107), an “aspect déterminé” (Meil-
let 1937: 221), or ‘backgrounding’ (Daues 2009); and it is entirely unclear
to me how such an iterative-durative aspect would differ, in semantic
terms, from the causative-iterative meaning commonly ascribed to the
*-éi̯e/o- formant. Yet, *-sḱe/o-presents are unanimously placed in the cat-
egory of present stem formations, while *-éi̯e/o-formations are placed
in the ‘derived verbs’. Similar arguments for the quondam semantic val-
ues of the nasal infix presents, the thematic presents, and various other
types of present stem formations have been forwarded, and there is at
least some consensus that the root formations are the only ones likely
never to have had any kind of additional semantic value.
If even some version of these hypotheses is true, it is clear that the
distinction between the present stem formants of the ‘primary verbs’
and the very paradigms of the ‘derived verbs’ are in fact, diachronically
speaking, equally “semantisch differenziert” from the basic root. The
‘derived verbs’ are simply the formations whose semantic range had not
yet, synchronically, been weakened and eroded away by the time of late
Indo-European, but which still had a tangible meaning. But this in itself
does not seem an adequate reason to label them separate paradigms
considering the serious drawbacks to such an approach.12
It should be eminently clear by now that I consider the terms ‘primary

verbs’ and ‘derived verbs’ to be doubly problematic: not only are they
both misapplications (in my view) of the concept of primacy; the latter
is also a misapplication of the term ‘verb’.
12 Of course, once the individual languages started restructuring their verbal
systems and forming both aorist and perfect stems secondarily to these ‘derived
verbs’, they do assume the mantle of full verbal paradigms; but this is demon-
strably a later development whose establishment can be seen outright in the
evolution from the oldest Rig Vedic on to Classical Sanskrit, for example. 37
Instead of designating them ‘derived verbs’, I would instead focus on

their properties:
»» They are formed from a stem base that is built on a root by the
interaction of two processes: ablaut (either zero-grade, full-grade,
o-grade, or lengthened grade) and reduplication (unreduplicated,
e-reduplication, or i-reduplication).13
»» On the evidence of Vedic, they form all four moods, though caus-
ative-iterative optatives are very rare (MacDonell 1916: 195–207).14
»» They take primary endings in the indicative, mostly secondary

endings in the subjunctive, and only secondary endings in the
optative.
»» They form imperfects by prefixing *e- and using secondary end-

ings (possibly excepting the desiderative, which on the evidence
of Vedic did not form imperfects).
»» They do not function as the base from which to derive aorist or

perfect stems.
All these properties are shared with another category of which we have
already seen examples: the present stem formations. In other words,
while it makes little to no sense to consider causative-iteratives, denom-
inatives, and desideratives ‘derived verbs’, it is structurally sound and
13 I will not touch upon the intensive and its peculiar type of reduplication
involving the first consonant of both onset and coda of the root. Søborg (2015)
has convincingly argued that the intensive is a secondary development, to be
ascribed to Indo-Iranian rather than Indo-European itself, and I consider it
largely irrelevant to this thesis.
14 Causative-iteratives and denominatives form optatives in Homeric Greek
as well, but since both these categories have become fully-fledged verb classes in
Homeric Greek and also freely form aorists, perfects, and futures, this is hardly
conclusive. The desiderative had itself become the future in Greek, of course,
38 but there is no reason that I am aware of to believe that this future’s ability to
form optatives is secondary and not inherited.
fully compatible with their attested properties to consider them simply

as three more types of present stem formations. That the majority of
the traditional present stem formation patterns had lost their semantic
value and become simply morphological ways of creating a conjuga-
tional stem by the time of late Indo-European is no hindrance to this:
the medil stage between this and a semantically fully transparent for-
mation may be found in *-sḱe/o-, which must still have been at least
partly semantically meaningful into the earliest daughter languages,
though its generalisation in and close affinity with certain particular
roots, such as *pr̥ḱ-sḱé/ó-, shows that its semantic value was weakening
and waning early on.
The three verbal stems available to any Indo-European root have been
varyingly described as marking mainly tense (present, aorist, perfect)
or aspect (imperfective, perfective, stative/resultative), and they have
followingly been varyingly termed tense-stems (as by Fortson) or aspect
stems (as by Ringe). Some, like Fortson, view the stems as basically
aspectual, but still call them tense-stems, by dint of their ability to form
tenses rather than due to any correlation to actual tenses. I follow Fort-
son and most others in using the more traditional names for the stems
(present, aorist, perfect), though I do this only to be mainstream in at
least one aspect. My choice of terminology here should not be taken as
an indication that I believe the stems to essentially denote tense. It is
clear that, whatever its origin, by late Indo-European times the aorist
stem was firmly associated with the past and had gone from denoting
solely aspectual properties of the verbal action to denoting equally (if
not predominantly) temporal aspects; but it is equally clear that there
is nothing specifically temporal or even aspectual about causative or
desiderative formations. For this reason, I prefer to sidestep the issue
entirely and term the stems neither tense-stems nor aspect-stems, but
simply conjugational stems.
39
1.2 The origin of the conjugational stems

At this point, it is worth quoting at some length Don Ringe’s description
of the relationship between conjugational stems (aspect stems in his
terminology) and the concepts of aspect and tense:
At least in North IE (the non-Anatolian half of the family),

verb inflection was organized around the category of aspect.
The basic distinction was between eventive and stative forms;
within the eventives, there was a further distinction between
perfective and imperfective forms. Each verb stem (see below)
was inherently imperfective, perfective, or stative. A basic verb
did not necessarily make all three stems; some made only two
or one. […]
The perfective stem, traditionally called the aorist, denoted

an event without reference to its internal structure, if any. The
event might in fact have been complex, or repeated, or habit-
ual, or taken a long time to complete; but by using the aorist
the speaker indicated no interest in (or perhaps knowledge of)
those details. (Ringe 2006: 24)
Tense was expressed only in the indicative. The present

(imperfective) stem made both a present and a past indicative,
traditionally called ‘present indicative’ and ‘imperfect indic-
ative’ respectively, and distinguished by their endings, called
‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ endings respectively. As noted above,
the aorist (perfective) stem could make only a past, called the
‘aorist indicative’ and marked with secondary endings. The per-
fect (stative) stem could have made both a present and a past,
but it apparently did not; there was only a single perfect indica-
tive form, apparently used for both present and past, and most
of its endings were unique. (Ringe 2006: 25)
Another way of viewing this state of affairs is that tense was only a con-
40 jugational category in the imperfect aspect, i.e., in the tables formed
from present stem — and even there, it is incompatible with the sub-

junctive, optative, and imperative. It is thus hardly unjustified to state
that tense was rather a marginal category in the earlier Indo-European
verbal system.
Hoffmann (1970: 28ff.) notes that both present and aorist formations can
be formed with zero-suffixes (i.e., ∅, making root presents and aorists).
He takes this as an indicator that in a Pre-Indo-European stage, the two
must have been the same, and the preference for the zero-derived and
thus most basic formation must have been lexical, lying in the root itself
and its inherent Aktionsart. At such an (eventive–stative) stage of the
verbal system, the default and unmarked formation would be to simply
add the personal endings directly on to the root, the Aktionsart of the
root automatically providing the resulting surface form with an aspect
that was essentially, relative to Ringe’s term, internal structure–focused
(imperfective) or internal structure–agnostic (perfective).15 This is simi-
lar to the durative/non-durative Aktionsarten discernible in the English
simple past tense; durative ‘I slept’ vs. momentary ‘I fell’.
If we accept that any given root would at this stage develop a basic,
zero-derived table that was perfective if the root’s Aktionsart was per-
fective, and imperfective otherwise, then it seems unavoidable that the
attested non-zero-derived (i.e., suffixal) formations16 must be in the
first instance formations that somehow reversed the aspect of the base
15 I am leaving aside the stative aspect here. Ringe considers all three aspects
equal and considers *u̯ ói̯d-e a root with a stative Aktionsart, hence its unmarked
formation — unfortunately there are no other examples of roots with stative
Aktionsarten, and I find a single verb too sparse as evidence to base such a cat-
egory on. I prefer instead to view the perfect as an inherently marked form, and
the non-reduplication of *u̯ ói̯d-e to be secondarily reshaped from **u̯ e-u̯ ói̯d-e
by haplology, perhaps due to the frequency of that particular perfect. I therefore
reckon with only two Aktionsarten, focused and agnostic.
16 Meaning specifically formations with surface suffixes. I assume that root
formations, too, are underlyingly suffixal, but their suffix is a null morpheme not
visible in the surface form. 41
formation. Thus, a root perfective would stand in opposition to a suf-

fixal imperfective, and vice versa.
This purely aspect-based system was later partially reworked, and the
perfective aspect came to be associated especially with non-presential
events, while the imperfective aspect was associated with presential
events. This tallies with Ringe’s (2006: 24) description that “the present
tense by definition includes the time of speaking, which imposes inter-
nal structure on the event”: the perfective aspect, which specifically is
agnostic to the “internal structure” of an event and considers its anchor-
age in space and time, is ill-suited to express events that are seen as
taking place in the current and present.
There are two pieces of circumstantial evidence that points to the
perfective being originally the primary or default of the two eventive
aspects.
One is that the vast majority17 of the plethora of suffixal formations
that were secondarily created — presumably once the binary opposi-
tion of stative vs. eventive (and later the ternary opposition of stative
vs. imperfective vs. perfective) became too restrictive — ended up
in the imperfective group, implying that they were created as suffixal
counterparts to root perfectives. It must be assumed that all of these for-
mations to begin with carried some more specific nuance of meaning
that simple imperfectivity, but the majority of their meanings are now
lost to us: by the time of (late) Indo-European, their semantic range had
already been whittled away, leaving behind a formation that was north-
ing more than a morphological way of creating an imperfect (present
stem) formation.
The other piece of evidence is the emergence of the overt clitic
marker *-i, known as the hic et nunc particle, to firmly root the event
not only in time, but in the present time. This suffix was later joined by
a prefix *é- whose function was also to root the event in time, but in the
non-present (i.e., past). Anatolian, the first branch to break free of the
17 In fact, the only exception appears to be the *s-based formation that later
became the s-aorist. Since this is only quite rudimentarily reflected in Hittite and
not fully in Tocharian either, we may assume that this is in fact a later innovation
42 that arose later than most of the imperfective formations; in this case, we may
even substitute “all of which” here.
common Indo-European language tree, has *-i as an entirely integrated

part of its verbal system, but does not have *é- at all; *é- is only found
in later-attested branches, most significantly Indo-Iranian, Greek, and
Armenian, and is possibly a much later, dialectal feature limited to a
specific area of Indo-European. The general tendency in languages to
mark most overtly the least central and basic formations (cf. for exam-
ple the fact that the most highly marked verb table in Latin is the rarely
used pluperfect subjunctive) coupled with the fact that the imperfec-
tive clitic arose earlier than the perfective clitic makes it likely that the
default, and thus unmarked, aspect was originally the perfective.18
1.3 A revised model of the verbal paradigm

It is not clear how and when exactly this ternary aspect system (borne
out of an older binary eventive–stative system) began to break down,
but it is clear that by the time of late Indo-European, the verbal sys-
tem had become a more irregular combination of aspect and tense
intertwined:
»» The stative aspect had developed a resultative sense and had

become rooted in the present time, but its sole formation, the per-
fect, kept its original, highly distinctive and unique set of personal
endings and distinctive o-grade reduplication.
18 Going back even further, it seems likely that in the earlier binary even-
tive–stative system, the default aspect (or at least the one that formed the base
for productive innovations) was the eventive, and the stative was a more highly
marked, but also more inadequately preserved, relic of an erstwhile category.
The number of verbs for which a stative formation is reconstructible is far
lower than for the eventive stem types, and it is likely significant that the modal
distinctions appear not to have applied to the stative: there are no reconstructi-
ble perfect subjunctives or optatives. Since the Anatolian languages also display
no subjunctives or optatives, it is possible that these modal categories arose
in Ringe’s “North IE” and as neologisms applied only to the productive verbal
formation types, the eventive-based ones. 43
»» The perfective aspect’s ill-suitedness to express events rooted in

the present (now highly marked, both by derivation and by clitic)
had, ironically, forced it to become partly rooted in the temporal
plane itself, relegated to describing non-present events and pick-
ing up the non-present marker *é- along the way. The aspect was
represented solely by the aorist (two subtypes), which comprised
the original root formation and the late, innovative s-formation.
»» The imperfective aspect had, with its plethora of derivational

patterns, become the dominant aspect, its simple present now
the semantically (though not necessarily morphologically) least
marked form. Unlike the perfect and aorist stems, the present
stem was represented by a cornucopia of subtypes, comprising all
the suffixal derivations originally created to distinguish the imper-
fective from the perfective and now mostly semantically void, as
well, most likely, as more recent and still more semantically trans-
parent derivations.
The perfect stem had only its own peculiar endings, while the even-
tive-based stems had used the hic et nunc particle to develop extended
forms of the originally eventive endings, perversely traditionally called
primary endings, as opposed to the original, unaltered endings termed
secondary endings. Despite these absolutist terms, it seems sensible to
me to define their relationship to the two stems in term of markedness,
rather than (reversed) primacy, by keeping in mind that the extended
endings were originally created specifically for what was by this time
the present stem and were never intended directly for the aorist stem.
As such, it makes sense, when dealing synchronically with the late
Indo-European verbal system, to call the secondary endings unmarked
and the primary endings marked for the aorist stem; vice versa for the
present stem.
This ties in with the late-innovated imperfect tense as well. The
imperfect is built from the present stem, but is characterised by the
non-extended endings and the addition of the pastness marker *é-,
which characteristics combine to root it firmly in a time-plane, but
44 removing it from the present.
The default tense-aspect view expressed by the imperfective present

stem is to see an event as rooted in a presential temporal plane. For
the perfective aorist stem, the default view was the exact opposite: a
non-presential event not rooted in a temporal plane. As such, the
default tense formation for each stem would be the simple present for
the present stem and the preterite aorist for the aorist stem. Conversely,
the formation traditionally called the imperfect, being rooted in a tem-
poral plane, but in the non-present, is semantically more highly marked
in the present stem, whereas a formation built upon the aorist stem and
rooted in a presential temporal plane would be the more highly marked
formation there, if it had existed. Since the aorist stem’s aspectual view
was to see events as not rooted in a temporal plane at all, however, no
such form ever developed.19
My claim now is that in the indicative at least, there is a correlation
between the markedness of a formation in relation to its stem, and the
markedness of the set of personal endings employed within that stem:
unmarked formations employ unmarked endings, and marked forma-
tions employ marked endings. The markedness of both personal end-
ings and tense-formations is thus a property of the conjugational stem,
not the verbal paradigm as a whole.
Thus, in the present stem the unmarked formation (the simple pres-
ent) uses the unmarked (primary) endings, while the marked formation
(the imperfect) uses the marked (secondary) endings. In exactly the
same, yet converse, manner, in the aorist stem the unmarked formation
(the aorist preterite) uses the unmarked (secondary) endings, while the
marked formation did not exist at all.
It would in theory be possible to posit a similar scenario in the other

moods, with the subjunctive and optative being the marked and
unmarked ‘allomoods’ or ‘allotenses’ of a single, non-indicative mood,
but here the details bedevil the matter. While it is true that the optative
consistently employs secondary endings (and would thus be unmarked
in the aorist stem and marked in the present) and the subjunctive at
19 It is perhaps noteworthy that the ‘dependent’ form in Modern Greek, sys-
tematically a present aorist, uses presential endings, rather than aorist endings. 45
Indicative
Stem Formation type Subjunctive Optative
Unmarked Marked
root
— amphikinetic (full-/zero-grade)
— acrodynamic (Narten)
Nasal
— infixed
— *-neu-/-nu- suffixed
— *-neH-/-nH- suffixed
*-i̯e/o-
Table 1. Overview of the Indo-European verbal paradigm with its conjuga-

— zero-grade *-i̯é/ó-
Semantically void
— full-grade *-i̯e/o-
Reduplicated
— *e- (athematic) Simple present Simple imperfect Simple subjunctive Simple optative
— *i- (athematic)
— *i- (thematic)
tional stems and their accompanying formations.

Simple thematic
— full-grade
— zero-grade
Present Simple suffixal
— *-u-
— *-sḱe/o-
— *-de/o- ~ *-te/o-
— *-dʰe/o-
— *-se/o-
Causative-iterative
Causative-iterative Causative-iterative Causative-iterative (Causative-iterative
— o-grade *-éi̯e/o-
present imperfect subjunctive optative)
— long o-grade *-i̯e/o-
Semantically valued
Stative
— zero-grade *-éh1/h1- (fientive)
— zero-grade *-h1i̯é/ó- (essive) Stative present Stative imperfect Stative subjunctive Stative optative
— zero-grade root
— full-grade root
Desiderative
— full-/zero-grade *-s-
Desiderative present Desiderative subjunctive Desiderative optative
— reduplicated *-sé-/-ó-
— zero-grade compound *-s-i̯é/ó-
Root
Aorist S-aorist Aorist (preterite) Aorist subjunctive Aorist optative
(Thematic, reduplicated thematic)
Perfect Reduplicated o-grade Perfect
least chiefly employs primary endings (unmarked in the present stem,

marked in the aorist), actual usage of the subjunctive and optative in
the languages where both are best attested — Homeric Greek and Rig
Vedic — does not bear out any particular affiliation between either
mood and either stem’s aspect. Thus, for the Vedic material, Hettrich
(1988: 234–235), when discussing so-called tennr (“temporal-effizier-
end-noch-nicht-realisiert”) structures, concludes that “es scheint doch
passender zu sein, in solchen Konstruktionen den Konjunktiv im N[e-
ben]S[atz] als direkte Bezeichnung der Außerzeitlichkeit zu verstehen”,
which goes directly against any affinity the subjunctive ought to have
with the temporally rooted present stem. There is, in general terms, no
evidence that either mood was inherently more or less like any aspect;
the difference in use between the two is rather based upon the speaker’s
attitude towards the event, rather than his view of the event as having or
not having a relevant “internal structure”, or being or not being rooted
in any temporal plane (for the Homeric, cf. Chantraine 1963: 206–225).
I therefore retain the subjunctive and optative as separate moods.
The puzzling distribution of primary and secondary endings between
the two moods, which might otherwise have been at least partially
explained in this way, must remain a mystery.
To recap, I consider the late Indo-European verbal system to synchron-

ically consist of a root (derived or underived) which could potentially
form three conjugational stems through various affixational processes:
a stative-resultative perfect stem, an imperfective present stem, a per-
fective aorist stem. Of these, the first had its own personal endings and
formed only one verbal table (the perfect), while the latter two distin-
guished two related sets of personal endings and formed two tenses
(an unmarked or primary tense and a marked or secondary tense) in
the indicative mood and one tense in the subjunctive and optative.20
20 If the development of the pastness marker *é-, which is only found in
Armenian, Phrygian, Greek, and Indo-Iranian, is in fact an innovation of a 47
The perfect stem was formed by only one pattern; the aorist stem by
at least two (perhaps three or four) patterns with no discernible differ-
ence in meaning; and the present stem by no less than approximately
two dozen patterns, some of which display no discernible difference in
meaning, while others have specific semantic values.
Table 1 overleaf tabulates this system in what I hope is a meaningful
and self-explanatory way. Stem formation types are consolidated from
LIV2 and Ringe (2006).
2 Productive patterns
It is quite obviously not possible to say with any reasonable amount

of certainty which patterns were synchronically productive and which
were not at a given stage of a prehistoric and unattested language. The
following will therefore mainly deal with such diachronic developments
as can be gleaned from comparisons between Hittite (and Tocharian)
on the one hand, and Core Indo-European languages on the other, as
well as from data extracted from LIV2 (see the corpus description on p.
31).
Even with diachronic data, caution must be given that a multitude of
factors interact with the general, sweeping tendencies I shall attempt
to document here. A detailed investigation into individual attestations,
dialectal group and not reconstructible for Indo-European itself, the present
model would more accurately be a model of the Proto-Armeno-Graeo-Aryan
verb itself, which would then not distinguish the imperfect from the present
injunctive. It is my view that the augment was at least partly grammaticalised
in Indo-European itself, and that Greek preserves this stage most faithfully,
the grammaticalisation having gone further in Armenian and been completed
48 entirely in Indo-Iranian. For the opposing view, see Meier-Brügger (2003: 182,
with further literature).
paradigms, forms, and reconstructions underlying the data involved

cannot be undertaken here, and there is every risk that further investi-
gation will reveal inaccuracies in what follows. I am mainly concerned
here with the broad swathes of productive patterns that affected the
late Indo-European language as a whole, however, and inaccuracies in
details or individual forms therefore do not constitute major setbacks
to this presentation.
In the following I take the verbal paradigm given above as a basically
stable system that forms the basis of developments into the individual
daughter languages. The productive patterns I document here are those
which can, with some reasonable certainty, be assumed to have had
some level of productivity in the late stages of the proto-language, as
opposed to ones arising and becoming productive only in the (pre-)
history of the individual daughter branches/languages.
2.1 Form productivity

Individual forms are often tricky to reconstruct for Indo-European; it is
often clear that much reshaping and analogous restructuring through-
out and across tables have taken place, but it is rarely clear how much
is ascribable to the Indo-European period and how much is down to
secondary developments in the daughter languages. The plethora of
incompatible and contradictory reconstructions of the personal end-
ings, often the most generous source of both intra- and intertabular pro-
ductivity, bears witness to the substantial amount of analogical reshap-
ings the endings must have faced up to and during the Indo-European
period. I shall therefore only deal briefly with the 2sg. marker *s here,
as an ending of universally agreed-upon and well-known productivity.
There is at least some good evidence that in the active non-perfect
paradigms, *s had become a very stable and productive marker of the
2sg. This *s was regularly either final or intervocalic, both positions
where it is liable to weaken, rhotacise, or disappear altogether, but it was
almost without exception restored in the individual daughter languages 49
whenever this happened. Such was the productivity of this clear marker
that it tended very strongly to encroach upon perfect and middle forms
in various ways, through replacement or addition.
On the comparative evidence of Hittite, Celtic, and Indo-Iranian, the
2sg. middle ending can be reconstructed with reasonable certainty to
something like *-th2e(r) or *-th2o(r), with *-r being originally the mid-
dle version of the hic et nunc marker which in the active was *-i. Sihler
(1995: 471ff.) reconstructs *-th2o(r), considering *-o as the marker of the
middle inflection in general;21 Fortson (2004: 86) reconstructs *th2e(r)
and does not reckon with an actual marker of the middle voice.22 This
ending is directly attested most clearly in Hittite -tta-ri and in Old Irish
-ther (2sg. deponent in the weak verbs; cf. Strachan 1949: 36). It is less
clearly seen in the Vedic secondary middle ending -thās, whose long
vowel is of unknown origin, though possibly the long vowel in the 2du.
ending -(e)thām and its relation synchronically to the corresponding
active -tam is involved somehow. It seems likely, in any case, that the
additional -s is to be equated with the 2sg. active marker encroaching
upon the middle form.
A more thorough encroachment is seen in the Vedic active form -se (<
*-soi̯) and Greek -σοι, Gothic -za (< *-soi̯), Latin -re (later -ris, compare
also Old Latin -rvs) where the *s has completely replaced the *t(h2) to
become the sole marker of the 2sg. throughout the active (non-perfect)
paradigm. In the case of Latin -ris and Old Latin -rvs, this encroaching
*s eventually rhotacised to yield *r, whereupon the immense stability
of *s as a marker of the 2sg. revealed itself by attaching itself to the now
anomalous ending *-ro (< *-so, in Old Latin) or -re (in Classical Latin).23
21 Sihler (474) also argues that the middle hic et nunc marker may in fact have
been *-ri, rather than merely *-r. This would simplify things for the Hittite forms,
and it would make derivation of some Old Irish forms easier; but it would entail
more difficulty than *-r for most of the Old Irish deponent forms, and there are
other concomitant problems as well, for which see below.
22 He writes (86), “[t]his *-r is now generally thought to have been the primary
middle marker, corresponding to the *-i of the active”, but his meaning here
is obviously that *-r is the marker of the primary endings in the middle voice,
rather than it being the main mark of the middle voice itself.
50 23 These are probably two independent developments, since the Old Latin
addition happened before all unstressed, short, final vowels became -e. The
An additional innovation here is the encroachment of the active hic

et nunc marker *-i on the middle inflection, replacing inherited *-r. In
arguing that an original hic et nunc marker *-ri in the middle is bet-
ter suited to explaining the attested forms, Sihler (474) has no doubt
overlooked the vitiating effect this replacement has on that argument.
The replacement of middle (and presumably rarer) *-r by active (and
presumably more common) *-i is understandable enough, so long as
both are transparently conceived as hic et nunc markers; but any such
replacement of *-ri by *-i is utterly bewildering, since *-ri would already
transparently end in the active (or in that case, perhaps rather univer-
sal) *-i.
If Sihler’s argument that *-o- was the original marker of the middle
and was thus extant throughout the paradigm is correct, a much more
likely scenario would be for the ending *-o-ri to be rebracketed as *-or-i,
in order for the hic et nunc markers to align perfectly. The middle voice
would then be marked by *-or, rather than merely *-o, and this would
presumably spread to other middle forms. No such rebracketed forms
are attested, however, and there is no evidence it ever took place. As
this leaves the Graeco-Aryan substitution of *-i unexplained, I see little
merit to the argument.
2.2 Tense productivity

The only actual tense formations in Indo-European (as opposed to stem
formations, for which see the following section) were the imperfect
indicative, derived from the present indicative, the subjunctive, the
optative, and arguably the present and aorist injunctives.
Classical Latin development, on the other hand, postdates this development, but
precedes the raising of vowels in final syllables ending in *-s. Alternatively, the
encroaching *-s could have continued to be a clearly hypercorrect addition for
such a long time that sound changes had the time to occur ‘around it’, as it were. 51
Of these, the injunctives were derived, as it were, by ‘reverse deriva-

tion’: their characterising mark was the absence of derivational signs
(the augment *é- and the hic et nunc marker *-i). It is perhaps hardly
meaningful to call this derivation type ‘productive’ as such, but to the
extent that it survived into the attested languages at all, its formation
appears to have been entirely stable. The imperfect, inasmuch as it was
a fully grammaticalised tense at all, was formed by the addition of the
augment to the injunctive, and its formation seems to have been equally
stable in Indo-European itself, though it was subsequently lost in Italic,
Germanic, and Celtic (Sihler 1995: 554).
Given the small inventory of tense-like formations in the Indo-Eu-
ropean verbal system and their general stability until the individual
daughter languages, it hardly surprising that there is not much to say
about tense productivity in late Indo-European; we will instead move
on to stem productivity and paradigmatic productivity, both of which
are a lot more interesting to dive into.
2.3 Stem productivity

As can be seen in Table 1 above, no less than thirty distinct stem for-
mation patterns can be reconstructed for Indo-European. This includes
quite a few that are quite obviously variants of each other, as well as
some that are sketchy at best. I have already mentioned in note 15 on p.
41 that I do not find the evidence for a non-reduplicated perfect as a
category in Indo-European compelling; additionally, Cardona (1960) has
allegedly convincingly refuted the thematic aorist as a category in the
proto-language except for the single form *h1ludʰ-é/ó-. Unfortunately,
his dissertation has not been available to me, so this is based on state-
ments drawn from Drinka 1995: 155 and Ringe 2006: 29 (who also states
that *wé-wkʷ-e/o- is the only reduplicated aorist found in more than one
daughter language). Whether or not any of these forms actually existed
in the proto-language, I do not think I am acting irrationally by dismiss-
52 ing their formation as being definitely unproductive in Indo-European.
In Greek and Indo-Iranian, the thematic aorist later became highly

productive (see Drinka 1995 and Cardona 1960 for details), but the for-
mation was obviously marginal at best in Indo-European.
In a similar fashion, I believe it is safe to dismiss as unproductive those
formations which are in LIV2 attested in only a small number of roots,
keeping in mind that many of these are not independently confirmed
and occur only in one branch. In addition to the above-mentioned, I
consider the following LIV2 types to be so insignificantly attested that
their productivity must have been moribund or at the most stagnating
even in the proto-language: (1c–d) zero- and full-grade root statives, (1i)
thematicised i-reduplicated, (1m) *-néH-/-nH-, (1t–v) *-de/o-, *-dʰe/o-,
and *-te/o-24 (plus *-se/o-, which is not listed in LIV2). The remaining
22 formation types have enough attestations that they appear likely to
have been at least moderately productive in the proto-language. For
reasons of space, however, I shall deal here only briefly with the aorist
and with the four most common present stem formations: thematic
presents (LIV2 type 1n), *-i̯e/o-presents (LIV2 types 1q [zero-grade] and
1r [full-grade]), nasal presents (LIV2 types 1k [nasal infix], 1l [*-nu-], and
1m [*-neH-]), and root presents (LIV2 types 1a [amphikinetic] and 1b
[Narten-type]). Together, these four stem types represent 986 roots or
83.5 % of all LIV2 roots.
24 Going by the attested roots, *-de/o- and *-te/o- are in fact just one forma-
tion: *-te/o- is attested for two roots, both ending in *-ḱ, while *-de/o- is attested
for four roots, all ending in *-H. It seems obvious that the underlying form is
*-de/o- and that *-te/o- is merely due to voicing assimilation; I count them as
one in my corpus. It is notable that all four *-de/o- roots end in a laryngeal, and
tempting to suggest that *-dʰe- is also the same suffix. Such a postulate may be
possible, but I have not looked further into the matter, since this/these suffix(es)
are so peripheral and not relevant to this study. I will just note in passing that
there are quite a few laryngeal-final roots in the *-dʰe- group, as well. 53
2.3.1 Root presents and aorists

As detailed in the section on the origin of the conjugational stems
above, and as universally agreed upon, the most archaic stem type is
the underived one which involves mood markers (outside the indica-
tive and imperative) and personal endings being attached directly to
the root.
Archaic formation types are almost a priori expected to become less
productive over time, and it is clear in the history of the Indo-European
daughter languages that this did indeed also happen with root forma-
tion types. There are, however, enough root formations attested to state
with good certainty that they were still quite frequent in Indo-European
itself, particularly in the aorist (cf. the paragraph on the perfective as
the default aspect on p. 42). LIV2 lists a total of 409 root aorists as well
as 204 root presents (152 full-grade and 52 Narten-type).
It is perhaps hardly surprising that there are so many root aorist
formations, since the only competing form, the s-aorist, is most likely
a later innovation (on this see among others Jasanoff 1988, Watkins
1962: 67ff.) only beginning to be generalised as an aorist formant by the
time Hittite and Tocharian split off. In late Indo-European, the *s-ao-
rist must — pace Jasanoff’s (1994: 207) Hittite/Tocharian–based claim
that the sigmatic aorist cannot be reconstructed for the parent lan-
guage — be considered at least moderately, and probably prolifically,
productive, but in earlier stages, the root aorist was still the only availa-
ble type and thus bound to be prolific. For a type that had had no com-
petition for so long, however, it is not impressively more common than
the *s-aorist, so it must be assumed that the *s-aorist took away a good
deal of the root aorist’s productivity. It would be my estimate that root
aorist productivity was stagnating in late Indo-European outside those
formations which specifically favoured them (see end of 2.4 below).
Given this, it is hardly surprising that the number of root presents is
much smaller: the original primacy of the perfective aspect entailed an
affinity between it and underived formations, while the markedness of
the imperfective aspect and its entailed development of a wide array
of formation types yielded a veritable cornucopia of ways to reshape
54
and refashion earlier root imperfectives into suffixated present stems.25

Nonetheless, root presents remained relatively frequent, second only to
*-i̯e/o- presents, nasal infix presents, and simple thematic presents in
pure frequency. The presence of a fair few roots that seemingly form
root presents and yet are attested only in Western languages (frequently
a combination of Celtic, Baltic, and Germanic)26 might indicate that
root presents were not only frequent, but also somewhat productive in
late Indo-European.
2.3.2 Nasal presents

Nasal infix presents are listed for 248 roots in LIV2. They are attested
in all branches of Indo-European including Hittite, though they were
almost universally remodelled in the later languages, either by rein-
terpretation of the infix as a suffix based on laryngeal-final roots — as
everywhere in Germanic (Ringe 2006: 178ff.) and types 2 and 3 in Greek
(Sihler 1995: 500) — or by simplifying the ablaut of the nasal infix, usu-
ally in favour of the zero-grade — as everywhere in Latin and in group 4
in Greek (Sihler 1995: 500f.).
Indeed, it is possible that such a development, at least towards
the reinterpretation of the infix as a suffix, had already begun in the
final stages of Indo-European itself. LIV2 lists 52 roots with the suffix
*-néu̯ -/-nu-, which has traditionally been identified with a detachment
of the nasal infix whereby “das Nasal-Infix-Präsens zu dreiradikaligen
Wurzeln mit Vollstufe II und schließendem /u/ als zweiradikalige
25 I am agnostic to whether such reshapings would make the resulting forma-
tions primary or secondary. If the derived formant simply took the place of the
underlying zero morpheme from the underived formation, the result would be
a primary formation based on the root itself; if the derived formant was added
to the existing underived stem (with the zero morpheme), the result would be a
secondary formation based on a conjugational stem. Since both results would be
identical on the surface, I consider the point moot.
26 Examples include *trenk- attested in Insular Celtic, Germanic, and Baltic
(LIV2: 649; IEW: 1093–1094) and the homophonous pair *rei̯ǵ- and *rei̯⁽ǵ⁾- attested
in Old Irish, Middle High German, and Latin (LIV2: 503; IEW: 861–862). 55
Wurzel mit Suffix -néu̯ /nu- interpretiert wurde” (LIV2: 18). Sihler (1995:
501f.) argues against this view as follows:
For years it seemed obvious that the source of the formation

was a metanalysis of PIE *ḱl ̥new-/*ḱl ̥nu- ‘hear’, an ordinary
n-infix formation to a root *ḱlew-. There is nothing inherently
unlikely about a formal type springing from a single item, but
in fact the traditional explanation was always dubious: no root
*ḱel- ‘hear’ is independently attested, and the relationship
between the infix and the root in *ḱl ̥new- was unambiguous. In
any case the usual explanation became untenable with the dis-
covery of Hitt., where the new-type is copiously attested, indeed
productive; the ordinary n-infix type is all but non-existent; and
the root ḱlew is not attested in any form. (In other IE languages
it is a notably tenacious root.)
It must first be noted that Sihler is incorrect in stating that the nasal
infix type is “all but non-existent” in Hittite — it is, in fact, quite well-at-
tested, though it has also been refashioned to some extent there (see
Kloekhorst 2008: 152–155 for a reasonable attempt to align the Hittite
forms, which span both the ḫi- and the mi-conjugations, with the classi-
cal Indo-European infix). This does not mean, however, that his objec-
tions are unwarranted. Apart from *ḱleu̯ -, LIV2 lists 39 roots ending in
*-u̯ , but out of these, only three are attested with nasal infix presents, all
exclusively from Vedic and Greek.
Of the 52 roots attested with *-nu-presents, only 18 have a root shape
that makes the reanalysis of an originally triconsonantal root in full
grade II as a biconsonantal root with *-u̯ - as part of the suffix; of these
18, six are uncertain and four form two pairs of homophonous roots
(and *-nu-presents), leaving a total of only ten possible roots to form the
basis of the reanalysis of a nasal infix as a suffix: *dʰeu̯ -, *gʷʰer-, *h1ei̯,
*h2er- (two roots), *h3er-, *ḱen-, *kʷer-, *mei̯-, *per-, *seu̯ -, *ster-. The
branches who have yielded attested *nu-present forms for these roots
show forms for the following number of roots (given here as directly
continued forms / reshaped forms):
56
› Indo-Iranian 10 / 0
› Greek 3/0
› Armenian 1/4
› Slavic 0/1
› Celtic 0/1
It cannot possibly be coincidental that every single secure, non-re-

shaped reflex comes from Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian (the
latter contributing only a single form); nor that Indo-Iranian adduces
non-reshaped forms for all ten roots while no other branch has more
than three, or indeed that *h2er- (2) is the only root to display non-re-
shaped *nu-presents in both Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian.
If the *-nu-suffix were originally a rebracketed form of the nasal infix
in triconsonantal roots ending in *-u̯ , it is highly suspicious that, apart
from *ḱleu̯ -, virtually all possible candidates for this rebracketing show
up only in what has already for a long time been recognised as a closely
related dialect area, most of it even coming from only one single branch
of that dialect area. The scenario becomes even more implausible when
we factor in the fact that *nu-presents are far more productive in Hittite
than nasal infix presents, despite the fact that Hittite does not show a
single form in any of the roots supposedly responsible for the origin of
the suffix (including *ḱleu̯ -, which is otherwise by far the most firmly
established and widespread root to take as the base).27
I conclude from this, in agreement with Sihler, that the *nu-present
can in fact hardly be a late tergiversator from the nasal infix that was
then extended to roots willy-nilly. Rather, it appears we must simply
posit a separate Indo-European suffix — whether originally related
to the suffix that eventually yielded the nasal infix or not remains
entirely beyond our scope of vision — which gained moderate pro-
ductivity especially in the Greek–Armenian–Indo-Iranian dialect area,
27 It is surely not irrelevant, either, that a few scattered Germanic forms of
*nu-presents are attested, through frequently reshaped, despite the fact that
*ḱleu̯ - is suspiciously absent from Germanic, too, the only non-Anatolian branch
not to have the root attested at all. 57
particularly in Indo-Iranian, but likely never graduated from stagnating

productivity in other branches.
Rasmussen (1990) and Milizia (2004) also deal with this problem,
including also the parallel *-neH-suffix which appears at first blush
to be the equivalent to *-neu̯ - in roots in *-ei̯. Milizia concludes that a
principle of sonority governs the formation of nasal presents: only roots
ending in a phoneme with lower sonority than the *n in the affix could
form nasal infix presents; roots ending in sonorants chose instead the
suffix *-neu̯ -. He also argues, incidentally, that *ḱl ̥-néu̯ - is a ghost form
that only exists in Indic, where it is taken over from class VII verbs that
all have zero-grade. If this is indeed true, and his arguments are con-
vincing, there would be no way whatsoever left for the nasal infix to be
the originator of the *-neu̯ - suffix.
Having now disposed of the posited Indo-European date of provable

reanalysis of the nasal infix as a suffix, we may return to the matter of
the productivity of the affix itself. Here, I believe we must distinguish
between the actual form of the nasal element and its usage. By usage, I
mean not the meaning it imbues upon the verb it attaches to (hypothe-
ses that it was originally transitivising, telicising, etc., are not compelling,
and I prefer to claim agnosticism as to its semantic value), but rather
the fact that, despite refashionings in nearly all branches and frequent
‘abradication’ (that is, being pushed outside the root and made into a
suffix), there are still clear and obvious traces of it in most branches.
The form of the nasal element as an ablauting infix can thus not be
said to have been particularly stable beyond the proto-language; but the
use of an easily distinguished nasal derivational element survived and
in some cases even gained moderate productivity. Thus Germanic and
Balto-Slavic all developed productive nasal formation types that denote
fientivity, intransitity and (in Slavic) perfectivity (Meiser 1993: 291).
The immense frequency of nasal infix presents in LIV2, combined
with the relative dearth in Hittite (Kloekhorst 2008: 152 lists 17, com-
58 pared to 151 *-i̯e/o-presents; cf. 2.3.3) would indicate that they had
been moderately productive for some time before Hittite split off, at
which point the nasal infix type lost its productivity in Hittite to the
*nu-formation, which conversely became prolifically productive (111
verbs listed in Kloekhorst 2008: 127f.). In Core Indo-European, *nu-for-
mations remained moderately productive (being associated especially
with roots ending in a sonorant, but growing beyond this original base
in later times), whereas nasal infix presents became prolifically produc-
tive for a time, almost rivalling the simple thematic formation pattern.
As a category, the nasal (infix or suffix) presents must be said to have

maintained at least moderate productivity even after the split into
branches and daughter languages. Their refashioned descendents
remain highly frequent in Italic; the later innovative nasal derivations in
Germanic and Balto-Slavic attests to the continued productivity of the
category in these branches as well; the Indo-Iranian languages actually
broadened the scope of nasal presents, creating highly productive verb
classes based on them; and most of all, the groups of nasal descendents
in Greek which Sihler (1995: 500) terms group 1 (the double nasals that
have both nasal infix and suffix, as in μανθάνω, πυνθάνομαι) and group 3
(-νῡ-verbs) are prolifically productive throughout the history of Homeric
and Classical Greek.
2.3.3 *-i ̯e/o-presents

Two types of *-i̯e/o-presents are listed in LIV2: a zero-grade type (189
roots) and a full-grade type (50 roots). The two forms are clearly related,
though the difference in root ablaut cannot be touched upon here. With
a total of 239 roots, *-i̯e/o-presents are the third-most frequent present
stem type in Indo-European, behind nasal and simple thematic pre-
sents. Along with *-sḱe/o-presents, *-i̯e/o-presents are among the only
thematic formations attested in Hittite.
If they were not already in Indo-European, the pure presential
*-i̯e/o-formations numbered above all but universally became formally
indistinguishable from denominative *-i̯e/o-formations which were 59
also, by all accounts, very frequent but are sadly considered ‘derived’ by
LIV2 and thus not listed or counted. Had they been counted, it seems
likely that *-i̯e/o-formations would make up a larger group than simple
thematic presents (if the ratio in Kloekhorst’s numbers below holds
outside Hittite).
Thus Sturtevant (1951: 122) states that already in Hittite “[d]enomi-
natives form the largest group of verbs with suffix iya” and Kloekhorst
(2008: 129) that “[t]his class is one of the most productive verbal class
in Hittite. In NS texts, almost all verbs show at least a few forms that
are inflected according to the -i̯e/a-class”. Kloekhorst divides the Hittite
verbs into three groups: original *-i̯e/o-presents (31 verbs), denomina-
tives (68 verbs), and verbs who took on -i̯e/a-inflection secondarily at a
later date (52).
For the Vedic material, Macdonell (1916: 205) numbers the denom-
inatives as “over a hundred” in the Rig Veda and “about fifty” in the
Atharva Veda. Kulikov (2012) includes later formations in Vedic, but
unfortunately categorises them by synchronic morphology rather
than semantics, thus conflating the semantically void presents and the
denominatives; he treats in great detail no less than 315 -ya-presents
(plus a selection of 27 post-Vedic formations).
In Greek and Latin, denominative*-i̯e/o-formations built on various
other present stem types form the basis of patterns (in Greek particu-
larly *-id-i̯e/o > -ίζω, in Latin particularly *-eh2-i̯e/o- > -ā-, i.e., the first
declension which eventually mad up nearly 80 % of late Latin verbs)
whose productivity can be classified as highly prolific, bordering on the
mandatory, subsuming verbs of many other formations into their class
types.
Even without going into details of other branches, who largely attest
to the inherited frequency, though not necessarily quite to the subse-
quent rampant productivity, the conclusion is surely unavoidable, based
on the combination of a large group of inherited forms and often even
larger groups of newer, innovated forms, that *-i̯e/o-presents (including
here denominatives) are the single Indo-European verbal formation
type that enjoyed the highest degree of stable productivity, both in the
proto-language and in many of the descendent daughter languages.
60
2.3.4 Simple thematic presents

The simple thematic present is often quoted as the ‘normal’ present in
Core Indo-European. Its *-e/o-marker was distinctive yet simple, con-
tributing no doubt to the popularity of the formation; yet its unstressed
nature and short makeup also made it liable to weakening and syncope.
Throughout the history of the daughter languages in most Indo-Eu-
ropean branches, the productivity of the simple thematic inflection
tended to wane to moribundity early on, leaving only a smallish core
of thematically inflecting verbs in more or less irregular classes: in Old
Irish and Germanic, they are scattered throughout the only stagnatingly
productive strong verbs; in Latin, they formed one part of the core of
the unpredictable third conjugation of almost entirely moribund pro-
ductivity; Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Greek maintained a fairly
large group of simple thematic presents, but in Balto-Slavic, they mostly
ended up in the unproductive class I. Only in Indo-Iranian and Greek
did they maintain moderate productivity, and Modern Greek has a large
core of stagnatingly productive simple thematic verbs to this day.
Going by LIV2 numbers alone, the simple thematic presents are the
most frequent and prolific stem formation pattern in all the Indo-Eu-
ropean verbal system, being attributed to no less than 426 roots. This is
remarkable for two related reasons.
First it must be borne in mind that Anatolian famously does not
show a single secure trace of the simple thematic present formation,
and that Tocharian has been shown to have only two or three words
that securely continue inherited Indo-European simple thematic pre-
sents (see Malzahn 2010: 363f.; cf. the almost simultaneous discovery
of this fact by Jasanoff 1998: 313f. and Ringe 2000: 125f.). For this reason,
the simple thematic present is generally accepted to be a later, Core
Indo-European innovation.
As mentioned in 1.2 and 2.3.1 above, there is good evidence the perfec-
tive Aktionsart/aspect (= the aorist stem) was originally the primary, and
the imperfective (= the present stem) the secondary. One would there-
fore, a priori, expect the root aorist to be the most prolific one — espe-
cially considering the initial non-existence of any alternative perfective
formation, as opposed to the wealth of imperfective formation patterns
available. And indeed the root aorist does come close (409 roots, only 61
17 less than for the simple thematic present).28 But looking at the totals,
it is evident that the imperfective aspect — or rather, the present
stem — had taken over and become the default at some point before
the stage attested by LIV2. Adding up all present stem vs. aorist stem
formations, there are in my corpus of 1,149 LIV2 roots 1,093 (95.1 %) that
form a present stem, but only 580 (50.4 %) that form aorists.
The lateness of the *s-aorist is supported by the ratio of root vs. *s-ao-
rist (409 or 70.5 % vs. 177 or 30.5 %),29 but highly surprising is the fact
that in the present stems, the simple thematic present — which is as
late as, probably even later than,30 the *s-aorist — is massively domi-
nant, despite its lateness: out of the 1,149 roots that form presents, the
426 that form simple thematic presents make up 39 %, far outstripping
other patterns that were both older and still productive, like nasal pre-
sents (248 roots or 22.7 % without *-nu-presents; 300 roots or 27.4 %
with them) and *-i̯e/o-presents (189 roots or 17.3 % without the full-
grade type; 239 roots or 21.8 % with them; possibly more than simple
thematic presents if the number of denominatives were known and
could be added).
The only possible conclusion, which is hardly a surprise to anyone
familiar with the Indo-European verbal system, is that the simple the-
matic present appeared on the stage just before Tocharian split off and
then gained productivity with a completely unparallelled rapidness,
rushing forth in a burst of what must have been almost mandatory
productivity before losing its momentum, possibly even before the split
into daughter languages, and settling down to moderate productivity
until this too was gradually lost outside Greek.
28 If only certain formations are counted, there are in fact more root aorists
than simple thematic presents: 265 vs. 224.
29 This yields 101 %, which is due to the fact that four roots (*bʰer-, *ǵneh3-,
*h2u̯ es- (1), and *preḱ-) are listed as forming both a root and an *s-aorist.
30 Their relative ages are difficult to judge. The tentative first steps towards
the *s-aorist appear to be attested in both Hittite and Tocharian, whereas the
simple thematic present is only reflected in Tocharian; but conversely, the the-
matic presents attested in Tocharian reflect a fully functional thematic forma-
62 tion, whereas the beginnings of the *s-aorist reflected in Hittite and Tocharian
are only individual forms that had not yet spread to form a paradigm.
2.4 Paradigmatic productivity

It is often stated that the Indo-European verbal system was not based
around conjugational classes (thus, for example, explicitly Fortson
2004: 81, and implicitly in just about all other works that deal with
the Indo-European verb as a system), but simply around the possibil-
ity of each root to form one or more of the three conjugational stems
mentioned in 1.1 above. This is indeed basically the system that we see
in Vedic and Greek — in the latter arguably even up to the present
day — where knowing one stem in a verbal paradigm does not auto-
matically enable one to derive any other stems for the same verb. The
more stringently applied conjugational classes seen in Latin, Germanic,
and to some extent also Celtic are the result of a later process of simpli-
fication to make the verb more predictable.
It would be highly unlikely, however, if the Indo-European verb sim-
ply formed stems completely at random. Indeed, a particular affinity
has long been noted between nasal presents and root aorists, seen espe-
cially in Greek and the Vedic class V and IX (corresponding to *-nu-pre-
sents and nasal infix presents of laryngeal-final roots, respectively).
This affinity has been expounded thoroughly upon by Strunk (1967)
and since also statistically quantified by Milizia (2004) and Søborg
(2012, esp. p. 26), and I shall not deal with this correlation here, except
to back their findings. It should also go almost without saying that the
significant productivity of nasal presents, particularly in Indo-Iranian,
coupled with the close affinity between them and the root aorist must
surely have formed the basis for a highly productive and predictable
verbal pattern.
To my knowledge, no other systematic attempts have been made to
unearth particular correlations between the other stem formations,
and this study is not the place to undertake a full-scale investigation
into stem type correlations in Indo-European. I should, however, like
to briefly point out a few statistical anomalies that have, as far as I am
aware, gone largely unnoticed.
The first thing to be noted ties in with the quote from Fortson (2004:81)
in 1.1 above that “[n]ot every verb could form all three tense-stems. Quite 63
a few did not form perfects, for example”. While it is certainly clear that
many verbs did not form perfects — only 281 roots or 23.7 % of all the
roots in LIV2 are thus listed — the fact that (as per 2.3.4 above) only half
the listed roots form aorists at all has not generally been remarked upon.
Nor does it seem to have been noted that, of the 580 roots that form
aorist stems, 56 (9.6 %) do not form a present stem at all (the number
rises to 109 (19 %) if we narrow it down to the ‘big four’; see 2.3 above).
It is hardly surprising, given the identification of the traditionally
‘derived verbs’ as present stem formation types and the likelihood that
all other derived present stem formations once had semantic signifi-
cance, that there are many roots which form multiple present stems; no
less than 329 (30.1 % of the roots that form presents), in fact. Conversely,
it is a testament to the lack of any real semantic meaning underlying the
*s-aorist formation that only four roots form both aorist types.
Looking at the underived root formations on their own, we find an
anomaly: out of the 52 reconstructed Narten-type root presents, no less
than 24 (46.1 %) correspond to a root aorist. This is highly unexpected,
given that the corresponding ratio for ablauting root presents and root
aorists is 5 out of 152 (3.2 %). This was noted also by Kümmel (1998,
passim) who posited that Narten ablaut arose by ablaut ‘upgrading’, to
distinguish the present from the in many forms identical root aorist.31
Regardless, Narten presents are so few and clearly not productive that
this correspondence must have been noticeable, but hardly a template
for new formations synchronically.
Perhaps more likely to be a candidate for a productive correlation
is the fact that *-i̯e/o-presents too seem to unduly favour root aorists.
31 This theory ties in well with my proposed original primacy of the perfective
aspect —it would make sense to ‘upgrade’ the ablaut to a more highly marked
type in the more highly marked aspect — but it seems an oddly ad hoc way
for the speakers of Indo-European to get around this problem, considering
the number of other present stem formants available to them. One possible,
though hardly provable and possibly disprovable, solution would be to posit that
Narten presents are simply relicts of the very beginning of the Indo-European
verbal system, made when no other present stem formation was available, or at
least when all other present stem formations still retained their semantic value
64 and were thus not suitable. One might have expected a larger class of Narten
presents in such a case, though.
Following Søborg’s (2012: 26) method of arriving at a ratio between root

aorists and *s-aorists for a given stem type, I arrive at the following:32
Stem type Root aorists *s-aorists Total aorists

Nasal present 158 85.0 % 28 15.0 % 186 100.0 %
*-i̯e/o-present 84 85.7 % 14 14.3 % 98 100.0 %
Overall 409 69.8 % 177 30.2 % 586 100.0 %
While the overall size of the material is slighter for the *-i̯e/o-presents,
the percentile ratio between the root aorist and the *s-aorist are almost
exactly the same, both showing more than twice the average preference
for the root aorist. Keeping in mind that both nasal/*-i̯e/o-presents
and *s-aorists were found above to almost certainly have been highly
productive in late Indo-European, the fact that two productive pres-
ent stem formation types so clearly preferred the presumably, by late
Indo-European times, less productive root aorist is indicative of not just
one, but two productive patterns.
Having sifted through the statistical data for a wide array of stem forma-
tion types as reconstructed by LIV2, I have not found much to shake the
foundations of established notions about the structure of the Indo-Eu-
ropean verbal system. A few anomalies that I have not seen mentioned
before have stuck out, but no major correspondences that would justify
dividing the system into conjugational classes have presented them-
selves to me. I thus conclude that, despite some patterns in some fre-
quent formations, a large percentage of Indo-European roots formed
their conjugational stems in ways that were not obviously connected
32 Although it must be said that my numbers differ from Søborgs since I count
double forms; thus, he counts *teh2⁽ǵ⁾ as a reduplicated aorist only, whereas I
count it as both a root aorist and a reduplicated aorist. We both arrive at 248
nasal infix presents, but while Søborg counts 132 root aorists, 21 *s-aorists, 2
reduplicated aorists, and 93 with no aorist, I count 126 root aorists, 22 *s-aorists,
2 reduplicated aorists, and 101 with no aorist. Unlike Søborg, I include all three
types of nasal present and both types of *-i̯e/o-presents. 65
and must, to a great extent, have been more or less arbitrary. Productive
stem formation patterns vied with one another, yielding a bewildering
labyrinth of stem combinations that cannot have been easy for the for-
eign speaker to acquire and master.
66
PROTO-CELTIC
The Proto-Celtic verbal system is an obscure corner of Indo-European

linguistics about which little has been written, and little is indeed known.
The earliest Celtic inscriptions available to us all hail from much later
stages, and though some of the oldest in various Continental Celtic and
Celtiberian languages appear to be relatively conservative and archais-
ing, most are unfortunately too short to give much detail about how the
language worked as a full system, particularly in the verb. Only with the
beginning of the literary Old Irish tradition do we begin to see longer,
coherent texts that consist of more than formulae comprising predom-
inantly names and an occasional standard verb form. By the time of
the earliest Old Irish texts, however, much had already happened since
Proto-Celtic, and our evidence for the Proto-Celtic stage is thus heavily
hampered by a disproportionate over-representation of Goidelic mate-
rial which can easily slant the reconstruction of Proto-Celtic unduly.
In the following, I attempt to lay out an overview over what happened
at the Proto-Celtic stage in the verbal system, and though little has been
written specifically about this (most scholars simply do not mention at
which stage many changes took place), it will appear that a good deal
more can be inferred than is perhaps normally assumed. In particular,
some of the changes to the verbal system that are commonly implicitly
ascribed to Insular Celtic can in fact to a reasonable degree of likelihood
be ascribed rather to Proto-Celtic; conversely, Insular Celtic, which has
traditionally been seen as rather heavily innovating, emerges looking
relatively conservative, innovating only really in a few places.
1 From Indo-European to Proto-

Celtic
Like Germanic, it appears that Celtic continued the development which

had already begun in Indo-European of substituting a purely aspect-
based verbal system with a purely tense-based one. The aorist and per-
fect stems are both continued in form, but their functions appear to
have merged early on to form the preterite.33 While Old Irish does have
an (innovative and secondarily formed) imperfect in addition to the
preterite, this seems to be the only aspectual distinction left in the lan-
guage expressed in stem formation — ironically the exact same place,
the imperfect, which was the only unquestionably temporal aspect of
the Indo-European verb.
What little we know about the Continental Celtic verb allows us to
surmise the existence of at least a preterite and a future, but no forms
have been suggested to be imperfects, though it must have existed still
(see The ‘neo-secondary’ endings on p. 90). The optative is likewise
missing, though the subjunctive is richly attested. Interestingly, in the
earliest texts in Gaulish (e.g. appisetu ‘let him see’ in the Thiaucourt
inscription; see DLG: 45) and Celtiberian (e.g., uśaPiTus ‘let him raise,
erect’ in the first Botorrita text; see Eska 1989: 121, 176 and Meid 1993:
126f.), several instances of a future imperative is attested, though such
33 The scarcity of preterite/perfect forms attested in Continental Celtic do

not permit an unequivocal statement as to whether they were still function-
ally distinct. Gaulish δεδε ‘gave’, ειωρου/ieuru and ειωραι/ieuri ‘sold’, as well as
Lepontic TETU (presumed to be identical in form and meaning to δεδε) look like
reduplicated aorists/perfects (but without the o-grade), possibly with perfect
endings; but Gaulish sioxti ‘sought’ (?) has reduplication (possibly with o-grade)
with a primary ending, so even if aorist and perfect were still functionally
distinct in Proto-Celtic, they must have started coinciding formally very early
on and cannot have remained distinct even functionally for long. See Lambert
(2003: 65f. and 104f.) for further discussion on these preterite forms. Schumacher
(2004: 59) considers it “wahrscheinlich, dass vor der Verschriftlichung Synk-
68 retismus eingetreten war” for Gaulish and remains agnostic on Celtiberian and
Lepontic.
a form does not appear in any of the Insular Celtic languages. Since the
Gaulish and Celtiberian forms match the future imperative in *-tō(d)
otherwise attested, it is probably safer to assume that it is inherited and
had become common (perhaps even productive) in Continental Celtic,
while stagnating and eventually disappearing altogether in the Insular
Celtic branch.
It seems to be almost entirely universal in Celtic that the subjunctive
had been dislodged from its position as a mood formed by the addition
of a mood marker to an eventive stem (present or aorist) to constitut-
ing instead its own basic stem, from which the present subjunctive was
formed (the aorist subjunctive being lost without a trace as a tense cat-
egory, though not as a formation type; see below).
There is little decisive evidence whether Proto-Celtic continued the
opposition of primary and secondary endings found in Indo-European
in the present stem: it has been argued by among others Cowgill (1975)
and McCone (1979, 1986, 1991) that Insular Celtic gave up the second-
ary endings and generalised the primary endings throughout, but the
Continental evidence is inconclusive. Celtiberian shows only seemingly
primary endings in -Ti (3sg.) and -nTi (3pl.), though the vagaries of the
Celtiberian script makes it difficult to say whether these reflect [-(n)ti]
or just [-(n)t]. Gaulish inscriptions contain both forms that look like
primary endings and forms that look like secondary endings, but these
are not distributed in any way that is relatable to the familiar Indo-Eu-
ropean system, and many of the primary-looking endings can also be
interpreted as containing a suffixed subject (or object) pronoun -i(d) ‘it’
(cf. e.g. DLG: 79 for buetid). Since a generalisation of primary endings
are required for Insular Celtic (see the chapter on Insular Celtic), the
most likely scenario is in my view that Proto-Celtic did generalise the
primary endings, and that a subsequent apocope caused *-i to be lost in
Gaulish (and possibly Celtiberian), in a way entirely parallel to — but
by necessity separate from — how things turned out in Insular Celtic
(see From Proto-Celtic to Insular Celtic on p. 83).
69
Most of the refashionings in the Celtic verb are traditionally held to

have taken place post-Proto-Celtic times, chiefly in Insular Celtic and
the individual languages; the loss of the optative and the imperfect
seem to be the only major developments attributed to Proto-Celtic. In
the following, I will present an alternative view to this.
It appears from the abundance of stem formation types found in Old
Irish, corroborated and occasionally expanded upon by Continental
Celtic, that at the least the following Indo-European finite stem types
were distinguished synchronically in Proto-Celtic (some being the con-
tinuations of different formations in Indo-European; the numbers given
in parentheses are the number of reconstructed formations in KPV):34
»» Present stems:
› simple thematic (73)
› athematic (6)
› *-i̯e/o- (22)
› *-sḱe/o- (4)
› *-ī- or *-īi̯e/o- < LIV2 type ‘Essivpräsens’, *-h1-i̯e/o- (5)
› nasal (45)
› *i-reduplicated (3)
»» Subjunctive stems
› root (3)
› *-(a)se/o- < aorist subjunctive; see below (109)
»» Future stems
› reduplicated *-se/o- < reduplicated desiderative (89)
34 The preterite passive stem, used only to form the passive participle (<
70 *-tó-participle) remains remarkably stable even in Old Irish and will only be
dealt with sporadically when relevant to the context.
› unreduplicated *-si̯e/o- < desiderative *-s- with secondary thema-

tisation in *-i̯e/o- (only one root listed in KPV, but more examples
from Gaulish are extant)
»» Preterite stems
› *-(a)s- and *-t- < *s-aorist (23)
› root (3)
› reduplicated < perfect (86)

When talking about the productivity of stem formations in Proto-Celtic,
unlike late Indo-European, it becomes important to distinguish between
stem formation types be(com)ing productive, and entire stems becom-
ing productive. It is really only in the present and preterite stems that
we can talk about a fluctuation in stem type productivity, since these are
the only two stems that have direct Indo-European ancestors. The sub-
junctive and future stems are instead, by their very definition, produc-
tive stems; that is, they are forms which from their stems in the erstwhile
system were dislodged to form entirely new stems that became part of
the verbal paradigm. As they had no ‘competition’ against which to vie
for the prime place of productivity, their productivity can be said to be
mandatory. For reasons of space, I will deal here only with the present
and subjunctive stems, as well as give a brief note on the preterite stem.
2.1.1 The present stem

It takes only a brief glance at the relative frequency of the present stem
formations listed overleaf to see that athematic presents were clearly
no longer productive in Celtic — in fact, they were all but annihilated,
71
being subsumed into various other classes. This happened in many

Indo-European branches and is hardly exceptional.
On the other hand, *-sḱe/o-presents, which enjoy a great deal of pro-
ductivity elsewhere — especially in Greek, Italic, and Balto-Slavic — are
completely moribund in Celtic. They appear only in four roots, of which
two form no other stems than the *-sk-present and must thus be rejected
as true *-sk-presents: synchronically, *-sk- was simply part of their root.
When *-i̯e- monopthongised into *-i- in Proto-Celtic and *-ei̯e- (via
*-ē-) became *-ī- (cf. McCone 1996: 48f.), the stage was set for Proto-Celtic
to develop a large group of *-ī-̆ presents, which does indeed seem to have
been the case: in addition to the 22 strong *-i̯e/o-verbs listed in KPV (in
Celtic synchronically strong *-i-verbs), the largest class of weak verbs in
Old Irish (McCone’s W2; OIPG’s B(2); GOI’s A II) is made up of *-ī-̆ verbs
stemming mostly from thematised *-i̯e/o-presents (including denomi-
natives) and *-ei̯e/o-causatives. In her corpus of verbs attested in the
Würzburg and Milan glosses, Le Mair (2011: 157–257) lists 259 verbs of
this class, more than twice as many as in A I (106), the second-largest
group of words, and more than the entire number of strong verbs
attested at all in KPV (the verb counts from Le Mair’s corpus are from Le
Mair 2011: 45ff.). It is no wonder that this class enjoyed prolific produc-
tivity in Old Irish;35 presumably it was equally frequent and productive
in Proto-Celtic, though I know of no attested Continental Celtic verbs
that can incontrovertibly be placed in a similar class.36
Nasal presents maintained a certain level of frequency, but do not
appear to have been abundantly productive. Of the 45 nasal presents
listed in KPV, ten belong to roots that are not listed in LIV2; of the
35 There is evidence that roughly the same classes existed in British as in
Goidelic, but only the oldest layers of Breton reflect this with any kind of regu-
larity. In Old Welsh and Cornish, the classes were confused early on, no doubt
aided by the extensive apocope that removed most signs of the class-defining
vowel (Schrijver 2011: 57f.).
36 Presumably ueŕsoniTi in the Botorrita inscription — which has been gener-
ally accepted as a causative < *uper-sonh2-ei̯e-ti (thus Eska 1989: 116f.) or perhaps
*uper-dʰonh2-ei̯e-ti (thus LIV2: 144f., writing on p. 533 under *sonh2- that “Keltib.
„uersoniti“ ist dagegen als uerðoniti zu lesen und muß daher entfallen”) — would
72 fall into this class, but the lack of any other paradigmatic forms of this verb
makes it less than given.
remaining 35, only four (*dʰei̯ǵʰ-, *gelH-, *sleu̯ k-, *u̯ ie̯ h1-) have no cog-
nates outside Celtic, which is hardly enough to warrant calling the type
productive.
2.1.2 The subjunctive stem

There are only three roots that appear to show a subjunctive stem
based directly on the root itself, of which the status of one is uncer-
tain. The two certain ones are *kleu̯ -e/o-, subjunctive to *kli-nu- and
*klus-ī- ‘hear’; and *buu̯ -e/o-, subjunctive to *bu̯ -ii̯e/o- ‘be’ (KPV: 48f.).
Root subjunctives are clearly beyond moribund — an irregular stem in
the verb ‘be’ is almost expected, and *kli-nu-/*klus-ī- is synchronically
bizarre in sharing a subjunctive stem among two present stems.37 These
two or three cases may be safely ignored as forms that somehow man-
aged to bring their old (even if ‘old’ here means ‘remade within Celtic’)
subjunctives along when the new system with a separate subjunctive
stem arose, likely for lack of a good and obvious basic stem to form the
subjunctive stem from.
All other primary verbs listed in KPV form *s-subjunctives, as do all
Old Irish weak verbs and some strong verbs. The formation itself was
long problematic, being based essentially on the evidence of Old Irish
s-, e-, and a-subjunctives, but has now, to my mind, been satisfactorily
explained through the combined efforts of Watkins (1962: 122ff.) who
saw the distribution of the *s-aorist–based and the perfect-based pret-
erites; Rix (1977: 148–154) who drew upon this and saw the complemen-
tary distribution of the Old Irish s- and a-subjunctives and suggested a
possible venue to derive them both from the same stock; and McCone
(1986: 243ff., 1991: ch. 5) who improved upon Rix’s hypothesis in what I
consider a very elegant solution. I refer to the cited works for full details
and give here only a lapidary summary.
37 Compare how in modern Spanish and Portuguese ir ‘go’ and ser ‘be’ most
peculiarly and irregularly share a preterite stem fo-/fu-. 73
When the subjunctive became a stem of its own, the more highly
marked and uniform *s-aorist subjunctive was chosen over the inher-
ited system of a separate type of subjunctive built to each type of
present stem. The coalescence of all forms of *-(e)i̯e-(e)- in *-ī-,̆ the
generalisation of the zero-grade of the nasal infix, and the consistent
thematisation of forms wherever possible would in essence have caused
the subjunctive to be almost or entirely identical to the indicative in
the athematic presents, nasal presents, ‘strong’ *-i̯e/o-presents, and
‘weak’ *-ī- and *-ii̯e/o-presents, which we have already seen make up
a very large portion of the verbal inventory. The *s-aorist subjunctive,
on the other hand, would remain quite distinct with its *-s-e/o- marker.
Assuming that this took place after the development of interconso-
nantal laryngeals to *a, the result would in all laryngeal-final roots be a
sequence *-V-s-e/o-: for *Ceh1- roots, *-īse/o-; for *Ceh2- and *Ceh3- roots,
*-āse/o- (once *ā and *ō had coalesced as *ā); for *CeRH- roots, *-ase/o-.
This, incidentally, times the rise of the subjunctive stem quite pre-
cisely, since it assumes the following order of sound changes:
› loss of *-i̯- between front vowels38

› contraction of *e.e to *ē
› raising of *ē to *ī (and possibly around the same time of *-ō to *-ū
in final syllables)
› breakdown of the distinctiveness of the inherited subjunctive and
attendant burgeoning productivity of the *s-aorist subjunctive
› merger of remaining *ō and *ā as *ā
At the time this took place, the point of contact between root-final con-
sonants in *CeC roots and the *-s- of the aorist subjunctive presumably
had a limited effect, apart perhaps from voicing assimilation, which is
allophonic and automatic in the majority of the world’s languages. At
some point during Proto-Celtic, however, all non-dental consonants
38 I have argued elsewhere (Jacquet 2015: 7, arguing points raised by Griffith
2010: 44) that the loss of intervocalic *-i̯- in Celtic very likely happened in several
74 stages, with loss between front vowels — particularly identical ones — occurring

before loss in other positions.
became *x before *s (McCone 1996: 43f.), which upset the transparency

in certain roots. Present stems like *gab-i- ‘grasp, take’ would regularly
have formed highly anomalous *s-preterites and, by extension, sub-
junctives in *gax-s-(e)-. This was frequently rectified in the individual
languages by moving these verbs to more predictable classes, though
the actual details vary: Gaulish possibly retains the regular form in
gabxps on the Lezoux tablet L-101 (which has been plausibly read as
representing gabxsitu, perhaps with the b from the stem reintroduced
analogically);39 Old Irish has an a-subjunctive gabaid, -gaba; and Celti-
berian (Botorrita I) has KaPiseTi, seemingly indicating that the -i- from
the present stem was generalised into the subjunctive here.40
39 Note, however, the supposed 3sg. preterite form gabas (Châteaubleau tile
L-55; cf. Stifter 2009: 237ff.), which, if it is indeed a 3sg. preterite as it would seem,
would indicate that the change from *gax-s- to *gab-a-s- had already taken place
at the time. According to Stifter (2012: 160), the two texts are from approximately
the same period, around 100 AD. The reading and interpretation of gabas is more
secure than those of gabxps, so I remain hesistant that the Lezoux form does
indeed show a retained consonantal s-preterite, and prefer to think that Gaulish,
like Irish, regularised the verb into the *-a-group.
Additionally, the identification of forms like Gaulish gabas with Old Irish
gabais, -gab entails accepting a slight modification of the order in which sound
changes in Celtic took place. It is commonly agreed that the change *st > *ss
took place in Insular Celtic and did not occur in Continental Celtic, based on
examples like Celtiberian sistat on the rock inscription from Peñalba de Villastar
(MLH K.3.3) and the tentative identity of *-st- with Gaulish đđ and θθ in some
inscriptions. Schrijver (1994: 399–430) discusses the outcome of the cluster *st in
various positions in all branches of Celtic, conclusion in essence that Pro-
to-Celtic *-st- yields British *-ss-, while *-sst- yields *-st-. Mysteriously, though, he
completely fails to treat *st in absolute auslaut except by an indirect note on p.
409 under (10). I would suggest, based on the correspondence between the Irish
and the Gaulish formations, that in auslaut *-Vst in fact gave *-Vss already in
Proto-Celtic, while in anlaut and inlaut it remained and subsequently under-
went the various changes outlined by Schrijver. As Watkins (1962: 177) points out,
this was originally tentatively suggested by Thurneysen (GOI: 417), but it does
not seem to have been outright stated as a specifically Proto-Celtic development
since and is in fact actively denied by McCone (1996: 99) who apparently does
not consider the Gaulish forms in -as to be possible cognate forms and writes
that the *s-preterite “is so far unattested outside Insular Celtic”.
40 Jasanoff (1994) argues against this origin of the subjunctive, but is,
in my opinion, not very successful. His objections to the rise of the *-(a) 75
2.1.3 The preterite stem

Since the subjunctive is based on the erstwhile *s-aorist, the formation
of the preterite stem is largely parallel to the formation of the subjunc-
tive stem for those verbs which base their preterites on the old aorist.
Unlike the subjunctive, which was inherently thematic, the *s-aorist
was athematic, and the 3sg. form would have ended in *-s-t, which
would (as argued in n. 38) become *-ss and has been argued by Watkins
(1962: 174–180) and McCone (1986: 232) to be the starting point of the
new and highly productive preterite stem in *-ss-.
As Schumacher points out (KPV: 68), the distribution in his primary
verbs (which, in my terminology, includes both underived, primary, and
secondary derivations from an Indo-European perspective, but pre-
sumably exclusively — or almost exclusively — underived and primary
verbs from a synchronic, Proto-Celtic perspective) is remarkably in
favour of the reduplicated, perfect-based formations (92 certain forma-
tions plus three preterite presents) over the ‘weaker’ s-aorist–based ones
(26 formations). Since the Indo-European present stem formations that
retained semantic value had by now broken free of the root-based par-
adigm and formed their own separate paradigms, they were no longer
associated with the aorist or perfect of the original paradigm, and they
exclusively formed preterite (and subjunctive and future) stems in the
productive way.

It seems at least possible that the 1sg. thematic ending *-ō came in Pro-
to-Celtic to be considered undermarked (or perhaps rather overmarked,
since the generalisation of primary endings would make it just about
the only form in the table that did not end in *-i) and was optionally
se/o-subjunctive are mostly based on misunderstandings of the chronology
76 (including claiming that the *s-aorist was a productive type in late Indo-Euro-
pean by referring to its lack of productivity in Tocharian).
enlarged by adding the athematic ending *-mi, yielding *-ūmi41 or in

Insular Celtic *-ūmmi, perhaps influenced by 1sg. of ‘to be’ < *h1és-mi,
where *-sm- was assimilated to *-mm- in Proto-Celtic (cf. McCone 1996:
45f.). The Gaulish 1sg. present forms are strangely divided in that they
show a seemingly random distribution of original thematic forms in -ū
and ‘athematisedˈ forms in -ūmī,̆ even within the same text
between showing -ū ⟨u⟩ (e.g., delgu on the Banassac cup) and -ūmī ̆ ⟨umi⟩
(e.g., uediíumi on the Chamalières tablet), but the ‘athematised’ forms
would match the British forms in *-īṽ < *-ǖμi < *-ūmi (cf. KPV: 39).
On the other hand, as Stifter (2009: 242) points out, a distinct ten-
dency to lower word-final *-i to *-e is clearly attested as an ongoing pro-
cess through the history of the Gaulish inscriptions, and yet all the 1sg.
forms that are attested invariably end in -umi, never †-ume. This might
indicate that the final vowel was not *-ĭ, but *-ī, which is not compatible
with the athematic ending *-mi. His argument that the added *-mī may
instead be identified with the absolute subject pronoun *mē (< *me,
with monosyllabic lengthening as in Latin *mē < *me) is appealing, par-
ticularly since such an addition would be more likely to be optional and
thus appear only in emphasis, for example. It does, however, presume
that the syncretism in case forms seen in the Insular Celtic personal
pronouns had already taken place in Proto-Celtic, which is as far as I am
aware not otherwise certain, except for the fact that any relict of *éǵō
is not securely attested. Lambert 2003, Eska 1989, Meid 1993, DLG, and
Dottin 1920 all spare not a single word on the possible shape of the Gaul-
ish or Celtiberian personal pronouns, while Blažek 2008: 59f. attempts a
full reconstruction of the cases of the Gaulish pronoun on a fairly thin
basis, though still with no reflex of *éǵō.42
41 This must have happened subsequent to the raising of *-ō in final syllables,
naturally, since we would expect *-āmi otherwise.
42 He suggests that reguccambion in the Chamelières inscription (L-100) may
contain a trace, segmenting it as regu-c cambion, with -c being an enclitic relic of
*éǵō. See also DLG (217): “le doublement du c n’est pas expliqué”. 77

Unlike in Indo-European, there is strong evidence that the Proto-Celtic
verb was split up into to two classes, a strong and a weak, similar to what
has happened in many other branches over time. The inherently unpre-
dictable and ‘strong’ nature of the Indo-European verb was continued
in inherited verbs, which formed the strong class in Proto-Celtic, but the
transparence and subsequent productivity of certain stem formation
types, especially following the Proto-Celtic sound changes mentioned
in 2.1.2 above, provided an easy way to form missing stems once the
stem system was being remodelled and certain present stems had taken
on a life of their own to become separate verbs.
A large group of originally separate verbs merged in their present
stem formation in Proto-Celtic with the merger of *-(e)i̯e-(e)- in *-ī, as
mentioned above. A great many of these belonged to the group of new
verbs that had sprung from one or two originally individual present
stem formation types and thus lacked an inherited aorist and perfect
stem from which to build preterite, subjunctive, and future stems in
the newly fashioned system. This group of verbs thus had no option
but to choose from the currently productive suffixes employed to form
such stems, and the *-(a)se/o-based suffixes that were synchronically
present in all three stem types (in the preterite from the *s-aorist; in
the subjunctive from the *s-aorist subjunctive; and in the future from
the reduplicated *s-desiderative) must have been an obvious choice to
allow for maximum predictability and transparency.
Once matters had reached this stage and more or less settled there,
for the first time since pre-Indo-European times at least, an easily rec-
ognisable template to build new verbs would be apparent: presents
stems were formed by adding *-a- or, most commonly, *-ī- to the root;
78
subjunctive stems by adding *-ā ̆se/o- to the present stem;43 and preter-
ite stems by suffixing *-s(e/o)- to it.44
How new verbs formed their future stem is difficult to say. Continen-
tal Celtic has several future forms, particularly from Gaulish, but only
one can be safely assumed to be a recent formation. Their formations
all appear to correspond to the future stem formations described in
2 above and appropriate to the inherited verbs, including marcosior,
which looks very clearly like a denominative (from marcos/-a ‘horse’,
cf. DLG: 171f.). Old Irish, conversely, forms reduplicated futures only
to inherited verbs, adding instead to new verbs a suffix of still hotly
debated and ultimately obscure origin.
I find McCone’s (1991: 176–182) reasons for believing the origin of this
suffix to lie in the relatively recent prehistory of Irish, rather than in
Proto- or Insular Celtic, generally attractive,45 but they sadly require
believing in a very long stage (from Proto-Celtic through Insular Celtic
and all the way up to the recent prehistory of Irish) where inherited
verbs (regardless of their conjugation) had a future tense, while new
verbs did not. This seems to me an altogether implausible scenario.
Typologically speaking, defective verbs are quite common, and nearly
all inflected languages have them to some extent or another. As far as I
43 Presumably, judging by the a-subjunctives of (McCone’s) W 2 class, which

retain their palatal root-final consonant in the subjunctive, indicating *-ī-ā̆ ̆se-,
rather than simply *-ā ̆se-. Inherited *-ĭ-verbs, on the other hand, like *gab-i̯e- >
Proto-Celtic *gab-i-, formed their subjunctives (as frequently their preterites) by
attaching *-ā ̆se- directly to the root.
44 It is clear that the *s-aorist endings appear secondarily thematised and
with primary *-ti-endings in the Insular Celtic systems, but it is unlikely that
this thematisation dates back to Proto-Celtic, since that would have made them
identical to the subjunctive stem in the *-a- and *-ī-̆ verbs.
45 I agree with him that any connection with the Italic (and equally odd)
futures in *-bʰ(u̯ )- cannot be upheld for the simple reason that Indo-European
*-bʰ(u̯ )- would unambiguously yield (Insular) Celtic *-bw- > *-b-, and that the
distribution of f and b in the Irish future forms mandate that we are dealing here
with a true, original /f/, ruling out nearly any other option than Celtic *-sw-. I
find his derivation from the single paradigm soïd, -soí phonetically plausable
enough, but extremely productive patterns originating in a single, not particu-
larly common paradigm should always be viewed with some scepticism, and I
find McCone’s solution somewhat pleading on balance. 79
can tell, there is no literature on their typological distribution, but it is

my impression that defective verbs are always highly marked within the
verbal system as a whole, and in particular, that they are either one-offs
(like English ‘quoth’ or Old Irish ol, Modern Irish ar(sa) ‘says, said’), small
and unproductive groups (like Germanic preterite presents or Latin per-
fective verbs), or verbs lack forms due to a lack of semantic need (like
an imperative form of verbs of necessity or verbs like Polish słychać ‘it
can be heard, it is audible’, which are semantically not compatible with
the notion of imperatives in most contexts). The notion that the single
largest group of verbs in a language, the ones belonging to the group
new verbs are by default added to, should completely lack one of the
five basic verbal stems, and thus also the possibility to form two of the
nine basic tenses existing in the language, is not easy to accept. In the
rare event that such a thing does happen (for example the verb ‘be’ in
English being the only verb that has a past subjunctive), the expected
outcome is for the smaller, irregular class to follow the larger, regular
one and lose the distinction altogether, as has indeed been happening
with the past subjunctive in English for the past century or so (and as
may have happened in British, where no future is found, were that actu-
ally the situation at the time). The supposition that a large and prolific
class of verbs lacked an entire stem and its two concomitant tenses for
the better part of a millennium, if not more, only to then decide to join
the smaller class in forming one strains credulity at best.46
I do not propose to solve this Gordian knot here; but any solution
that aims to do so must take into account the fact that Gaulish (and
Celtiberian, if we may interpret the apparent existence and common
use of the future imperative as a strong indicator that a future indicative
also existed) appears to have been able to form future tenses to denom-
inatives and other derived formations — in an inherited manner, no
less — and that the complete lack of a way to do so in Insular Celtic
46 This argument may additionally also be made for the traditional view of
the Indo-European verb, as cited from Fortson on p. 35 above, that such a
large group of formations as the statives, causative–iteratives, and desideratives
were in fact special classes of verbs that, due to their conjugational type alone
80 and irrespective of semantic motivation, could form only one out of the three
basic stems in the language.
is simply not an ingredient to a tenable proposition. An ideal solution

would be one that were able to equate the Gaulish secondarily thema-
tised (?) *-si̯e/o-forms with the Old Irish f-forms, thus enabling not only
an understanding of the Irish suffix, but also a confirmation that Insular
Celtic verbs did indeed form futures as would be expected of them.
In brief, then, we may say that the Proto-Celtic verbal system grew out
of a complex and mostly unpredictable Indo-European one, beating,
for the most part, a profusion of more or less incompatible formations
based on semantic categories that were no longer recognised into a rea-
sonably sensible system which displaced most of these formations into
an admittedly large class of more or less irregular but non-productive
verbs, and built instead from their ashes a completely refashioned sys-
tem with a much higher degree of predictability, able to easily absorb
new formations.
81
INSULAR CELTIC
Unlike Proto-Celtic, which as we have seen was phonetically quite con-

servative and stable but morphologically highly creative and willing to
go to great lengths to form a regular and predictable pattern, Insular
Celtic retained their inherited well-formed verbal system quite conserv-
atively and faithfully in most morphological respects, but innovated in
a few crucial ways and also saw the beginning of what was to become
a truly momentous series of sound changes that befell the later Insular
Celtic languages, of which only Irish will be dealt with in the current
study.
1 From Proto-Celtic to Insular

Celtic
The verb that Insular Celtic inherited from Proto-Celtic was quite struc-
tured and simple, and to a great extent, its systematicity appears to have
been retained more or less unchanged through much of the history of
Insular Celtic. There are only really three major innovations in Insular
Celtic that effected — in the case of one of them, more aptly perhaps
afflicted — the verbal system as a whole.
One was the introduction of a new set of personal endings that, much
like their late Indo-European ancestors, signified non-presentiality and
pastness and were thus used to form what became the present imperfect
(traditionally called the imperfect), the future imperfect (traditionally
called the conditional), and the preterite imperfect (traditionally called
the pluperfect and only extant in British, where peculiarly it has both
pluperfect and future meanings).
The second was the development of a *t-preterite to match the
*s-preterite for roots of certain makeups.
The third was the generalisation of a verb-initial word order and a
more or less semantically void particle in second place in every clause,
be the first element verb, preverb, or particle. Combined with the
far-reaching and tumultuous sound changes that beset Insular Celtic
and, especially, its descendants, this seemingly harmless addition con-
spired to create an entirely morphological and non-semantic, yet excru-
ciatingly complex and bewildering, distinction between absolute and
conjunct inflection in all verbs.
In addition, a few sound changes must be specifically dated as Insu-
lar Celtic which would have far-reaching consequences for the entire
grammatical system of the language and its descendants. It is likely
that intervocalic47 lenition of voiced plosives (and probably also /m/,
cf. McCone 1996: 84–87) was already a feature of Proto-Celtic, but evi-
dence from Continental Celtic makes it unlikely that it was more than
purely allophonic, as in Modern Spanish or Danish. Whether this leni-
tion in Proto-Celtic applied across boundaries (as in Spanish) or not
(as in Danish) is impossible to say due both to the limitations of the
Continental Celtic spelling systems and the unlikelihood of a purely
allophonic difference being written down in the first place, a compar-
ison Spanish with Spanish being once again highly apt. (See McCone
1996: 81–98 for a much more thorough description of the existence and
conditionings of intervocalic lenition in Proto- and Insular Celtic.)
47 I use this term in relation to Insular Celtic and its descendants as a
blanket term for the specific contexts that triggered allophonic lenition. As
in Spanish, inter-resonantal would probably be a more accurate term, though
(unlike Spanish) it seems lenition did not occur in the position after resonants
84 /j w r l n m/, only before them. Absolute word-final position most likely also
triggered lenition.
At least by Insular Celtic, however, intervocalic lenition must have

become productive across word boundaries, and /s/ was added to the
list of lenitable consonants.
As mentioned above, the only major restructuring within the paradig-

matic morphology of the Proto-Celtic verb that took place in the Insu-
lar Celtic period was the addition of a second set of endings denoting
non-presentiality. Though this is not exactly a classic case of stem pro-
ductivity, I shall nonetheless relegate discussion on it to the discussion
on stem productivity in 2.1 below.
In this section, I shall instead deal with the supraparadigmatic devel-
opment of the absolute and conjunct inflectional patterns so crucial to
the later development of the Irish verb.48
If verbal derivation through the prefixing of various types of pre-
verbs (most commonly prepositions) was not already productive in
Proto-Celtic,49 it certainly became rampantly so in Insular Celtic. Even
48 Actual absolute and conjunct inflection cannot have been a property of
Insular Celtic, as it is the direct result of apocopes that did not occur until after
the split into Goidelic and British. Nonetheless, since the climacteric changes
in sentence structure that conditioned the split into absolute and conjunct
inflection occurred in Insular Celtic, I will describe the whole concept here.
49 This is of course deliberately litotic. Such preverbal derivation is highly
productive in more or less all Indo-European languages, and there is no reason
to believe that its productivity does not date back to the proto-language itself,
though different branches and languages vary on how tightly knit the resulting
preverb–verb unit becomes. In Vedic, Avestan, and Homeric Greek, for example,
the first preverb is usually freely movable, resulting in tmesis; in the modern
Germanic languages, they are in some verbs movable to certain positions in
some contexts, but not in others; in the Insular Celtic languages, they were not 85
more so than in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, the Insular Celts developed
an unparallelled predilection for exploiting preverbs to derive tertiary
verbs from existing ones: combinations with three preverbs to one
main verb are not uncommon, and four or even five are not unheard
of (see EIV: 1 for details). These are termed compound verbs, while their
non-preverbed counterparts are termed simplex verbs.
It has been recognised since the dawn of Celtology that Old Irish
and to a lesser extent also the British Celtic languages display a dis-
tinction in personal endings, using one set for simplex verbs that are
not governed by any preverbal element (including apart from preverbs
also the so-called conjunct particles, a description of whose Old Irish
realisations may be found in EIV, p. 1), and another set for verbs that
are governed by a preverbal element (including, thus, all compound
verbs). The endings used in the ungoverned forms of the verb tend to
be longer and more marked and are known as the absolute endings,
while the shorter (indeed often nonexistent) endings used with the
governed verb forms are known as conjunct endings. There is no trace of
any difference in meaning between the two endings: they are perfectly
automatic, depending only on the governedness of the verb. There is
often a great deal of similarity between the absolute and conjunct end-
ings, but they are rarely completely identical outside the forms formed
with the secondary endings (see 2.1 below), which make no distinction
between absolute and conjunct endings at all, and some forms of the
middle voice.
The origin of this peculiar distribution has of course been the topic
of much scholarly debate, and no conclusion has as yet been reached. I
shall briefly here sketch my own preferred hypothesis as I have argued it
elsewhere (Jacquet 2013: 18f.).
Kim McCone (1979) has argued that the road from an essentially SOV-
based sentence structure in Indo-European and Proto-Celtic to the VSO
structure found in the Insular Celtic languages arose essentially through
freely movable, but certain elements could intervene between preverb and verb;
and in the modern Romance and Celtic languages, as well as in many com-
86 pounds in the modern Germanic languages, they are entirely frozen in place,
fused with the main verb.
a gradual attrition of the efficacy of topicalisation. In Proto-Celtic, var-

ious enclitics (including emphasising clitics, but also object pronouns)
could attach themselves to any constituent in the sentence, but must
always be in second position, the word they were enclitic to being
forced into sentence-initial position; topicalisation was achieved by
placing the topicalised word at the head of the clause, suffixed with an
emphasising enclitic. In a topicalised sentence with a governed verb,
the emphasising enclitic would attach to the governing element, not yet
univerbated with the verb.
In early Insular Celtic, enclitics became restricted to attaching them-
selves to elements of the verbal complex, and they became intrinsically
connected with the stress pattern of the verb: they always immediately
followed the first element in the verbal complex, and the stress fell on
the syllable immediately following them, except in ungoverned forms
where the enclitic was at the end of the verbal complex and the inflected
verb itself took the stress. This had the side effect of rendering topicali-
sation as a means of emphasis all but useless, since any enclitic present
would cause the ‘emphatic’ word order to manifest; in response to this
arose the cleft sentence type that is so frequent in Insular Celtic (but
absent from Continental Celtic) as a means of emphasis. In essence, the
only time a verbal complex (including clitics) would now not be sen-
tence initial is when no enclitics were present in the sentence, which,
given the great affinity for enclitics in Insular Celtic languages, was not
frequent; the verb-final structure became highly marked as unusual.
At this stage, then, a sentence-initial verb with an enclitic after its first
element was the norm, and rare instances of verb-final clauses could
easily be brought into line with the normal type by fronting the verb
and employing the emptiest and most meaningless enclitic available, in
a way highly reminiscent of Biblical Hebrew or the Ancient Greek use of
δε. This enclitic is to be identified with an element originally supposed
by Rudolf Thurneysen to be simply an unexplained *-s-, later posited by
Cowgill (1975) to be *es, and finally argued by Schrijver (1994) to be iden-
tified with the clause connector *éti, already well-attested and familiar
from Gaulish eti-c ‘and thus’ and Latin et.
This enclitic, known commonly as the Cowgill Particle, attached
itselve thenceforth to the first element of any verbal complex in an 87
Insular Celtic clause that did not already have an enclitic (like an object
pronoun), except in those rare instances where the archaic verb-final
order was employed. Mirroring the cliticisation of forms of the Latin
copula, the initial vowel in *eti was dropped if it collided with a vowel
in the preceding word. Towards the end of the Insular Celtic period,
an early apocope of final *-i occured after unvoiced stops. When the
inflected verb was followed by an enclitic, including *eti, it would now
end in the (generalised primary) personal ending + *t, i.e., in nearly all
cases *-it (1sg. present *-ūt); when the enclitic was attached to a gov-
erning element instead, that element would retain an additional *-(e)
t, and the inflected verb would be subject to the apocope and lose its
final *-i. Thus ungoverned *bereti-’ti > *bereti-t, but governed *to-’ti beret
> *to-t beret.
In the earliest history of Old Irish and the prehistory of British, both
branches underwent a series of dramatic and highly complex sound
changes which included raising of mid vowels before high vowels; the
development of palatalised allophones of all consonants (except /h/)
according to a highly complex pattern; a second wave of intervocalic
consonant lenition, this time affecting not only voiced stops, but also
unvoiced stops and sonorants; as well as a very extensive and ruthless
bout of syn- and apocope which eradicated any trace of final syllables
that did not end in *-V̄ h < *-V̄ s (or *-V̄ θ < *-V̄ t). In pretonic syllables in
Old Irish, additional erosion of the inherited morphophonemic mate-
rial occurred: vowels were savagely reduced or lost altogether, and
unvoiced plosives tended to be voiced. All this conspired to yield the
following highly simplified development of the absolute–conjunct
inflection split:
Proto-Celtic Insular Celtic Old Irish
ungoverned *ˈbereti > *ˈbereti-’ti > *ˈbereti-t > *ˈbereþi-h > *ˈberiþi > ˈberiþ ⟨berid⟩
governed *tū bereti > *tū-’ti ˈbereti > *tū-t ˈberet > *tū-h ˈberʹeh > *to-ˈberʹe > do-ˈberʹ ⟨do-beir⟩
88
2.1.1 The preterite stem

Old Irish has, and the British languages show traces of, a *t-preterite in
addition to the widespread and prolifically productive *s-preterites. EIV
(54) describes the distribution of the Old Irish t-preterite as follows:
The t-preterite (GOI 421-4, OIPG 63-4) is formed by all but one
(-ern, see 2.3) strong verb with root-final r or l, about a dozen
roots in all, the two strong roots (em-, sem-) with final -m and
basic short e, and a minority of strong verbs ending in a voiced
guttural stop or fricative usually written g
The origin of the *t-preterite had been the object of much research for
over a century before the solution was essentially found by Watkins
(1962: 156–174) who noted that the t- and s-preterites were in comple-
mentary distribution in the strong verb classes where they occur: t-pret-
erites occur only with roots ending in resonants (except n) and g; s-pret-
erites occur elsewhere. Combining this with the realisation that the
s-preterite itself goes back to a generalised 3sg. in *-ss and the accepted
etymology of Irish tart ‘thirst’ < Indo-European *tr̥ s-tó-, he surmised
that the t-preterite was in fact completely parallel to the s-preterite:
since *-s- disappeared between a resonant and t, the 3sg. form to use as
the basis for the tabular levelling ends up ending in *-Rt alone, and the
*-t is generalised to the other forms as a new preterite marker.
That this stem formation was productive is easy to ascertain: similar
to the *s-preterites, the *t-preterites dominate the strong classes of verbs
in Old Irish for roots that end in resonants (except n). In most cases,
this is regular and to be expected; but in those cases where the verbal
root goes back to an Indo-European laryngeal-final root, the *s-aorist
would originally have been of the shape *CeRə-s-t, which became
*CeRa-ss in Proto-Celtic and formed the basis for the *-ā ̆s(e/o)-preter-
ite. There are, however, some laryngeal-final roots that are only attested 89
with t-preterites in Old Irish: *merh2- (marnaid, -mairn: mert-), *sterh3-

(sernid: sert), etc. It seems, indeed, to have been mandatorily produc-
tive, being preferred over what must originally have been an inherited
‘weak’ *-ā ̆s(e/o)-preterite for all strong roots ending synchronically in a
resonant (except, inexplicably, ernaid, -ern ‘sell’, which seems to form a
suffixless, non-reduplicated preterite ír, as if < *pērh3-∅).
2.1.2 The ‘neo-secondary’ endings

No mention has been made hitherto of the forms of the middle or medio
passive voice in Indo-European, nor of its successor in Proto-Celtic and
Insular Celtic.
It has long been known that there are in essence two different markers
of the middle voice in Indo-European languages: where Italic and Celtic
mark the middle with an element *-(o)r, all the other formerly known
branches marked with an element *-oi̯, and this was logically taken to
be a shared innovation between Italic and Celtic, which branches were
already thought to be closely related and stem from a common Ita-
lo-Celtic branch. With the discovery of Tocharian and Hittite, however,
it became clear that the *-r was in fact not a shared Italo-Celtic innova-
tion, since it was clearly and unambiguously reflected in both branches:
rather, it was the central Indo-European languages that had replaced *-r
with *-i̯.
As it happens, a closer examination shows that *-r is in fact not the
marker of the middle in Indo-European at all, though it certainly is so
in Italic and Celtic. Rather, the Indo-European middle marker is the
*-o- that precedes it, and the *-r itself is simply a middle variant of the
hic et nunc clitic *-i found in the active. This explains both the discrep-
ancy between *-r and *-i̯ in the middle — the latter being a straightfor-
ward and easily justified substitution of the active clitic for the middle
one — and in addition also the ‘new secondary’ endings that arose in
Insular Celtic.
As is the case with the active endings (see p. 42), the primary middle
90 endings were thus characterised by a voice marker *-o- and the presence
of a clitic *-r, while the secondary endings, used synchronically to mark

the non-present, were characterised by the voice marker *-o- alone. In
addition, both were marked by personal endings (preceding the voice
marker and clitic) that were markedly different from the active personal
endings, but appear to show a great deal of affinity to the perfect end-
ings.50 The singular endings, which are always the most securely recon-
structible, can thus be relatively robustly reconstructed as 1sg. *-h2-o(-r),
2sg. *-th2-o(-r), 3sg. *-(t)o(-r) (the latter sometimes, though not always,
with an intrusive *-t- from the active endings). The 3pl. seem likely to
have been originally *-r-o(-r), but hybrid forms were frequently formed,
resulting in *-nt-o(-r) or even *-ntr-o(-r) (cf. Sihler 470ff. for the endings
in general, and Jasanoff 1997 and Griffith 2009 for *-ntro in particular).
In the active, as we have seen on p. 69 above, Proto-Celtic or at
the latest Insular Celtic generalised the primary endings in the active;
no such generalisation seems to have taken place in the middle, how-
ever, which continued to distinguish primary *-or from secondary *-o.
McCone (1994: 134) describes this quite accurately:
Toisc gurb iad na foircinn phearsanta amháin a dhealaigh an

táscach (agus an mianaitheach) gnáthchaite ón táscach (agus
ón mianaitheach) láithreach san IE, caithfidh gur imigh an
difríocht seo nuair a rith na foircinn ghníomhacha phríomha
agus a macasamhla tánaisteacha ina chéile sa Cheiltis Inseach.
Ba chóir, áfach, go gcaomhnófaí an difríocht eatarthu san infhil-
leadh meánach/diúscartach agus feictear gur lean an t-infhil-
leadh gnáthchaite dearscnaitheach seo amach go dtí gnáthbhri-
athra gníomhacha ansin (28.1). Dá bhrí sin níl aon diúscartach
faoi leith ag foircinn ghnáthchaite na Sean-Ghaeilge. Is cosúil
mar sin go síolraíonn gnáthchaite agus modh coinníollach
na Sean-Ghaeilge ó tháscach agus mianaitheach gnáthchaite
meánach na hInd-Eorpaise faoi seach sa deireadh thiar thall.
Leath úsáid na bhfoirceann gnáthchaite seo amach go dtí an
50 On whether the middle endings originated in the perfect endings (= origi-
nal stative) I remain agnostic. It seems to me likely, but ultimately, it is irrelevant
for current purposes. 91
foshuiteach sa Cheiltis Inseach chun foshuiteach caite a chur ar

bun le cois an fhoshuitigh láithrigh de bhunús éigríochta a bhí
ann cheana.51
There must, in other words, have been a stage of either Proto-Celtic or

Insular Celtic where the present and the imperfect would have coin-
cided in the active, but not in the middle/deponent, leading to the gen-
eralisation of the middle endings in the imperfect.
I am more hesitant than McCone to ascribe the conditional to the
original desiderative imperfect, however. Synchronically in Old Irish,
the imperfect, conditional, and past subjunctive are perhaps the
most predictably formed tenses in the system, being unanimously
formed — even in strong and irregular verbs — by simply substituting
these ‘neo-secondary’ endings for the primary ones in the proper stem
(present, future, subjunctive). As the innovated f-future seems difficult
to reconcile with the Indo-European desiderative, McCone’s phrasing
implies that the use of the secondary endings were inherent to the
strong future and spread from there to the f-future. While this is not
implausible, it seems more economical to me to assume that the imper-
fect desiderative (like the imperfect causative, etc.) was mostly lost in
Proto-Celtic, and the neo-secondary endings were analogically spread
from the present stem to both the subjunctive and the future stems.
Ultimately, though, it is a fine distinction, and I am unaware of any way
to tell for certain. The fact that British has gone further than Goidelic
in adding ‘neo-secondary’ endings also to the preterite (active) stem
51 “Since only the personal endings distinguished the indicative (and the
desiderative) imperfect from the indicative (and desiderative) present in
Indo-European, this distinction must have vanished when the primary active
endings fell together with their secondary counterparts in Insular Celtic. The
difference between them must, however, have been preserved in the middle/
deponent inflection, and it can be seen that this distinctive imperfect inflection
then spread to the active imperfect (28.1). For that reason, the imperfect endings
have no special deponent forms. It seems, then, that the Old Irish imperfect
and conditional mood ultimately stem from the Indo-European indicative and
desiderative imperfect, respectively. The use of these imperfect endings spread
92 out to the subjunctive in Insular Celtic to form a past subjunctive next to the
present subjunctive of aorist origin which was there already.”
might indicate that the spread of these endings were a gradual, ongoing
process when the two branches split, though that is rather orthogonal to
whether they originally spread from one or two stems.
It seems that these three innovations constitute more or less the entirety
of what happened in the Insular Celtic period to upset the stable verbal
system inherited from Proto-Celtic. At the end of the period, thus, the
Insular Celtic verb must on the surface have looked quite a bit different
from its ancestor, due to the addition in varying locations in the verbal
complex of the Cowgill particle and (if this was not a Proto-Celtic devel-
opment) the lenition of intervocalic voiced plosives and *s.
The underlying tense formations and personal endings sans particle
remained, however, essentially unchanged, except for the addition
to the system of a *t-preterite and three new derived ‘neo-secondary’
tenses from the present, subjunctive, and future stems (and possibly a
burgeoning fourth one from the preterite stem).
93
OLD IRISH
Unlike the Proto-Celtic and Insular Celtic periods which were both
characterised by a phonetic stability and conservatism that, objectively
viewed, far exceeds that of Indo-Iranian, Greek, German, or Italic dur-
ing the same time frame, the periods that followed the split of Insular
Celtic into Goidelic and British was characterised by some of the most
extreme and dislodging sound changes attested in the Indo-European
languages, all of which happened over a suprisingly short span of time.
Amazingly, these changes, which rendered the vast majority of verbal
paradigms in Old Irish hopelessly complex and with only the vaguest
hint of predictability, seemingly did little to push the speakers of Old
Irish to adopt a strategy of comprehensive analogy to obtain a verbal
system with some semblance of regularity. The upshot was that the Old
Irish verbal system was, in a word, ridiculous.
1 From Insular Celtic to Old Irish
Five phonetic developments stand out as being pivotal to the character-

istic nature and ‘feel’ of the Irish language and its inflectional systems:
the second wave of lenition, nasalising, vowel umlaut, syncope/apoc-
ope, proclitic weakening, and palatalisation.
All developments but the last are shared with British Celtic, but
developed in different ways in the two branches and must be ascribed
to separate, though doubtless related, developments. This split, along

with the uneven split of the Proto-Celtic phoneme /kʷ/ into Goidelic
/kʷ/, but British and Continental Celtic /p/, has long formed the basis of
heated debate into the classification of the Celtic languages. While the
matter is not yet universally settled, I consider the classification implic-
itly followed in this study (that Continental and Continental Celtic split
first — leaving open the possibility that Lepontic and Celtiberian split
off at an even earlier stage — and that Insular Celtic subsequently split
into Goidelic and British) on balance to be more likely than the oppos-
ing view (as favoured by, e.g., Blažek 2008) that British and Continental
Celtic (or at least Gaulish) form one group, which split up from Goidelic
which then comprises the other main group.
Since the defining features of what changed Insular Celtic into Old
Irish are so overwhelmingly phonetic in nature, while the underlying
structure of the verb remained relatively stable, I will here depart from
the previous chapters on the development from one stage to another
by focusing on the phonetic upheaval that befell Irish, rather than the
structural tendencies in the verb, which I shall deal with in
1.1 Second lenition

The second wave of intervocalic lenition entailed lenition of the
unvoiced plosives which had thus far in Insular Celtic remained unlen-
ited. In British, this lenition followed the typologically most common
pattern (also found in the development of the Romance languages as
well as Modern Danish, English, and many dialects of German) that
unvoiced plosives become voiced; thus intervocalic /p b, t d, k ɡ/ give
a typologically common, but non-parallel system /b v, d ð, g ɣ/ in Brit-
ish. In Irish, a less common type of lenition took place, whereby the
unvoiced plosives became unvoiced fricatives to match their voiced
counterparts; thus intervocalic /p b, t d, k g/ give in Irish a less common,
but more parallel system /ɸ β, θ ð, χ ɣ/ where voicing remains the only
96 distinguishing feature in both lenited and unlenited consonants.
1.2 Nasalisation
Concurrent with or subsequent to this second wave of lenition, clus-
ters consisting of nasal plus plosive (i.e., /t k kʷ b d ɡ/, since /p/ had
been lost /ɡʷ/ become /b/ in Proto-Celtic) were reduced to single ele-
ments. With unvoiced stops, the results was a voiced stop in Irish and an
unvoiced, aspirated nasal in British (or rather, Old Welsh); with voiced
stops, the result was a voiced nasal in both branches (in effect, the stop
was lost). The details of how this skewed outcome came about is as yet
unclear, both for Irish and perhaps less so for Welsh (cf. Hickey 1997: 8).
It is clear that Irish ⟨f⟩ < *u̯ was also affected by nasalisation and
became voiced /β/,52 but the development of how this came about is
not entirely clear. McCone seemingly believes that “[A]fter a voiced
consonant w became v” (1996: 120), which does not seem a very eco-
nomic view to take in view of the fact, pointed out by McCone (1994:
88) himself, that /w/ was maintained up until the time of syncope in the
attested history of Old Irish.53 It seems rather more economic to posit
that *u̯ remained unchanged /w/ except after unvoiced consonants
(where it was unvoiced to /w̥ /, merging entirely with a preceding /h/),
and at some point after the syncope assimilated to and merged with the
other bilabial series extant in the language, unrounded /ɸ β/ where it
had not been lost. Initial /ɸ/ was then generalised from the frequent
cases where it would have followed an erstwhile /h/ < *-s and regularly
have become /ɸ/, in order to avoid an unparallelled variation /β ~ ɸ/ of
a type found nowhere else in the language.
This provides a simple and clear explanation and must be preferred
to the trail of events seemingly espoused by McCone (1996). It must be
admitted that the version laid forth in McCone (1994) comes signifi-
cantly closer to this description than to McCone (1996).
52 I am of the firm opinion that Old Irish, like the earliest recorded and metic-
ulously described forms of Modern Irish, did not possess labiodentals /f v/, only
bilabial /ɸ β/, and I therefore use only these symbols to avoid misconceptions.
Occam’s Razor would all but demand this.
53 It is not clear to me whether McCone uses v as a shorthand for whatever
the precise pronunciation was, or whether he truly believes that *u̯ became a
labiodental /v/ after voiced consonants. 97
1.3 Vowel umlaut

Both Irish and British display two types of umlaut affecting short vow-
els: raising and lowering; again, however, the details differ.
In Irish, only stressed vowels underwent raising, whereas both
stressed and unstressed vowels underwent lowering. Stressed (= initial)
*-e and *-o were raised to i and u if the following syllable contained a
high vowel *-ī ̆ or *-ū ̆ , while any *-i or *-u was lowered to e and o before a
non-high vowel *-ā ̆ or *-ō .̆
The British umlaut is more complex and also entails different con-
ditionings and rules for the two types. Lowering functions similarly
to Irish, except that only final syllables (originally stressed, but subse-
quently unstressed and then lost by apocope) caused lowering of the
preceding vowel, and only if the lowering syllable contained *-ā ̆. Rais-
ing, or more properly i-affection, is a highly complex matter, being most
importantly divided into final and internal affection which affected
different vowels in different ways.
1.4 Palatalisation
Old Irish maintains a very consistent and pervasive phonemic distinc-
tion between palatalised and non-palatalised consonants, which plays
a crucial role in both nominal and verbal morphology (the following is
mostly rephrased from McCone 1996: 115–120).
Palatalisation occurred in pre-Irish in three stages (1 to 3), and the
precise rules governing each are complex and depend on a finely poised
interaction between various different sound changes.
1 The first round of palatalisation occurred before the lowering

described above, in two steps (A and B). A happened before
raising. It affected single consonants and voiced nasal clusters
between front vowels or between any vowel (except *ā) and *ī,̆
98 except if the preceding vowel was stressed and rounded, in which
case labials and velars were not palatalised. B happened after rais-
ing. After the loss of final *-n and *-h, final *-e and *-i merged and
were shortened to a palatal schwa or glide *-i̯, which palatalised
any preceding consonant(s) except the cluster *cht, regardless of
stress or vowel quality.
2 The second round of palatalisation took place after lowering and

affected initial consonant(s) before stressed *ē ̆ or *ī.̆
3 The third round of palatalisation occurred after apocope of final

syllables, but before syncope (see below). It is to be assumed that
primary stress was regularly at this time on the first syllable, and
that every other subsequent (i.e., odd) syllable received secondary
or tertiary stress. In unstressed (i.e., even) syllables, short vowels
were reduced to two different, short, schwa-like vowels differenti-
ated only by palatality: front vowels became [ɪ̈]̟ vel sim, and back
vowels became most likely a simple [ə]. Like the *-i̯ obtained in 1a,
the front schwa palatalised any preceding consonant.
1.5 Syncope, apocope, and the rise of

mutations
Like palatalisation, syncope and apocope occurred in several stages,

though the conditioning factors are less complex.
It must be borne in mind that at the early stages of Primitive Irish
(or the late stages of pre-Irish), lenition and nasalisation were entirely
allophonic concept, arising predictably from the position of the conso-
nant in question. The loss of final syllables changed that (the following
mainly rephrased from McCone 1996: 120ff.).
The first part of this occurred when final *-h (< *-θ and *-s) and *-n
(*-n and *-m) were lost in word-final position, but remained in liaison
(similar to -s in Modern French). Final nasals had of course already 99
merged with a following consonant, even across word borders, to yield

simple nasals or voiced stops (or /β/, in the case of /ɸ/) and had already
been lost in those contexts, which may conceivably have aided their dis-
appearance from other contexts as well. *-h had likewise merged with
*u̯ -, yielding /w̥ /, later /ɸ/ ⟨f⟩. At this point, what had previously been
a predictable alternation between basic, lenited and ‘nasal-affected’
allophones became grammaticalised, since a final vowel could now be
followed by all three allophones.
The second part occurred when short, unstressed, word-final vowels
were apocopated away. At this point, the previously almost entirely
predictable and allophonic variation between palatalised and non-pal-
atalised consonants depending on the quality of the following vowel
became phonemicised word-finally where frequently there no longer
was a following vowel.
Subsequent to this and a dissimilatory loss of the first of two imme-
diately posttonic homorganic consonants separated only by *e or *i,
syncope swept through the language, obliterating every other syllable
starting with the syllable immediately following the stress, whereafter
the opposition between palatalised and non-palatalised consonants
had become phonemic everywhere except in absolute anlaut, where the
following vowel was still decisive (as indeed it remains today).
The complexity of the Old Irish verb after all these upending sound
changes had wreaked their havoc on the inventory must have been quite
sufficient for speakers to scramble for any kind of productive pattern
to apply to new words, of which Old Irish took in an awful lot at that
time, most from Latin. As will become clear, however, efforts like the
100 ones undertaken by their Proto-Celtic ancestors to regularise the verbal
system by utterly reshaping its very structure were apparently too dras-
tic for the Old Irish. Though diligent efforts were made to create possi-
ble patterns for the inclusion of derived and loan verbs, the structure of
the verb as it had looked before the above-mentioned sound changes
changed its form was adhered to as far as possible, and speakers sought
to create productive patterns by tweaking and exploiting existing fea-
tures in the language rather than by innovating new and getting rid of
old structures.
Since at least Insular Celtic times, it had been possible to form derived
verbs (in my framework tertiary derivations) by compounding words of
more or less any word class with the weak A II-class verb *sag-i- ‘seek
(out)’, and it was this pattern more than anything else that formed the
basis of an enormous group of derived verbs that entered into the A II
class themselves and ended up making up the majority of the class, reg-
ularising and simplifying its inflectional pattern in ways which no other
Old Irish verb did.
Apart from the *sag-i–compounds, however, little material was added
to or taken away from the structural basis of the verb, aside from the
creation of a distinction between deponent (< old middle) verbs and
true passives, and as both are fairly complex matters, I shall limit my
discussion of the Old Irish verb to them.

The middle voice inherited directly from Indo-European had at some
point — the material from Continental Celtic is too scant to give con-
clusive evidence as to when exactly, but some attestations do look like
they continue semantically middle or passive forms, so it is probably
safest to say during Insular Celtic — become stagnant outside the 3sg.
and 3pl. in standard verbal paradigms, though a number of deponent
verbs continued to exist in all classes.
In late Insular Celtic or on the way to Old Irish, a distinction devel-
oped between the deponent verbs, inflected according to the old middle 101
inflection in the present, and true passives, inflected only in the 3sg. and
3pl. in a manner that is very clearly based on the middle inflection also
(in the present; the preterite passive was built instead on the inherited
passive participle), but is nonetheless clearly distinguished from the
deponent forms of the same origin.
The origin of how the same inherited paradigm could yield two
always distinct forms has not been conclusively settled. McCone (1994:
143–145) discusses the origins of both the deponent inflection itself
(which is not straightforward either) and the distribution between
the 3sg./3pl. deponent and passive forms, setting up a highly complex
system of analogies back and forth between active and deponent, depo-
nent and (neo-)passive, absolute and conjunct, and verbal roots with a
different number of syllables that is perhaps logically unimpeachable,
but requires rather more constantly changing and interacting analogy
than I am comfortable believing could plausibly have occurred.54
Whatever the origin of the Irish passive, the distinction between it
and the deponents with which it shared so much of its makeup and
form became highly productive and formed the basis for the impersonal
forms still in frequent use today. Even more so, perhaps, the preterite
passive, being so easily and predictably formed from a form already
extant in the verbal paradigm, the passive participle.
The form of the past passive began as a copular sentence with the
copula elided, “X (is) Y’ed”, perhaps already in Proto-Celtic or at the very
least in Insular Celtic. Being adjectival in origin, the participle was of
course unable to express inflection for person by desinence, but it was
nonetheless at some point in Insular Celtic, if not earlier, reinterpreted
as a pseudo-active verbal form, enabling it to take object pronouns.
Unlike active absolute verbal forms, however, it could not take verb-suf-
fixal pronouns (see GOI: 270f.), but required the addition of a semanti-
cally void preverb in order to take infixed object pronouns if the verb
itself did not already have any preverbs; in Irish, this was no-, while in
Welsh, it was y (McCone 1994: 172).
54 Jasanoff has treated the subject too, in an article titled “An Italo-Celtic
102 isogloss: the 3 pl. mediopassive in *-ntro” (1997). Unfortunately this article has
been unavailable to me and is therefore not included here.
Possibly this was the place in the paradigm that provided a spring-
board for the comparative use of the present passive with empty pre-
verbs (when needed) and infixed pronouns (thus McCone 1994: 143). In
any case, it can hardly be coincidental that both passive formations use
empty preverbs and infixed object pronouns to mark the grammatical
subject (semantic patient) of the passive.
In the ‘neo-passive’ present, which must still have been overtly recog-
nisable as a slightly deviant deponent-looking form, it would in theory
be conceivable to use verb-suffixal pronouns by following in the path
of the deponents and turning the deponent stem in *-(t)or- into *-(t)
i- and add the pronoun to that. There is a very good reason, however,
that this did not happen: since deponence was lexically decided and
deponent and active forms were in complementary distribution with
no verb having both, deponents were free to switch their deponent stem
for an active one when a suffixed pronoun was needed. This would not
(necessarily) be true of the passives, however, who could be formed on
both active and deponent verbs. Switching to an active form for the
purpose of pronoun suffixation would, in the case of active verbs, ren-
der the resulting form entirely identical with a 3sg. (or 3pl.) active form
with an object; i.e., “I am hit” would in practice become “He hits me”.
An alternative way of forming non-third-person forms without risking
this type of ambiguity would obviously be highly desirable, and the past
preterite would make a good starting point for one.

There is little reason to believe that the prolific productivity the weak *ī-̆
and to some degree *ā ̆-verbs had enjoyed since their inception in Pro-
to-Celtic did not last until at least the end of the Insular Celtic period,
since these two groups remained the largest and most prolific groups of
strong verbs in both Irish and Welsh. During the Insular Celtic stage (or
conceivably even earlier, though there are no non-Insular attestations), 103
however, at least one new type of verb arose as a more clearly marked
derived formation: the *sag-i–formation, used in the main to form orig-
inally compound denominal and deadjectival tertiary verbal stems. The
semantics of the root *sag-i- ‘seek’ would imply that it was originally a
kind of neo-desiderative meaning ‘wishes for X’ or ‘actively seeks out
X’,55 but the actual attested evidence for such a meaning is slim and not
compelling. As is the case with the majority of present stem formations
in Indo-European, *-sag-i- had, by the time of the earliest attestations,
long since ceased to have any primary meaning and had become simply
a highly practical way to form derived verbs. In Old Irish and especially
Middle Irish, its use spreads like wildfire, to the detriment of *ā ̆- and
*ī-̆ verbs which remain moderately productive in Old Irish, but gradually
lose all productivity in later periods.56
In Old Irish, *sag-i–verbs are, strangely, deponent in the main, despite
the base verb saigid, -saig being active. Some examples of active inflec-
tion forms do exist even in the Würzburg and Milan glosses, and later on,
the deponent forms dwindle and disappear (not only in *-sag-i–verbs,
but in general); but there can be little doubt that they were originally
deponent. To my knowledge, no adequate explanation for this curious
fact has as yet been uncovered. Le Mair’s (2013: 63f.) somewhat cavalier
statement as to the semantic value of deponents in Old Irish in general
certainly does not stand up to scrutiny as regards *-sag-i–verbs (though,
to be fair, her statement is made in a thesis that excludes this group of
verbs for most purposes):
55 In this way, it is reminiscent of Japanese desiderative adjectives in したい

-shitai, which are based on verbs in す -su (the only productive way of forming
verbs in Modern Japanese, where verbs are an otherwise closed class) and mean
‘wishing to do X’ or ‘desiring X’.
56 It is interesting to note that *-sag-i- appears to have now run its course. In
Modern Irish, it forms the basic fundament and simplest paradigm type of the
productive second conjugation (the old *ā ̆- and *ī-̆ verbs forming the entirely
moribund first conjugation), but new loan words are more commonly taken up
as verbs in -áil, -(conjugational stem ál-), spread out from the verbal noun of
gabh- < Old Irish gaib- (verbal noun gabál < *gab-(i̯)a-glā-) and the verbs histor-
ically derived from it (tóg, tóg(bh)áil < *to-ad-gab-; fág, fág(bh)áil < *fo-ad-gab-),
104 and this is now quickly becoming the default class of verbs for new additions to
enter.
Old Irish deponent verbs retain the Proto-Indo-European mid-

dle voice meaning, i.e. they imply a stronger subject involve-
ment. This is not just the case in the primary verbs, but is also
borne out in the secondary verbs. If a secondary verb has a
stronger subject involvement, such as labraithir ‘speaks’ […], it
will become a deponent verb. […]
Each of [the 16 deponent A II verbs listed] has a clear motivation

for being a deponent verb, because each has a strong subject
involvement. There are no exceptions.
While I have admittedly not looked close enough at the material to

attempt to ascertain whether the original middle sense is at the bottom
of all deponent weak (or indeed strong) verbs, her statement does not
appear to me to be borne out by the 16 deponent A II verbs that she
lists. It is certainly possible to read a “strong subject involvement” into
some of them, like con-ruidethar ‘intends’ or cíallaithir ‘thinks about’;
but inferring any particularly strong subject involvement in samlaithir
‘compares’ or cuirethar ‘throws’ seems rather a stretch to me. Con-
versely, many weak, derived verbs which entail a great deal of subject
involvement are not deponent, such as marbaid ‘kills’ which, unless the
subject happens to be an assassin or perhaps a virus, certainly involves
the subject to be very actively involved.
In addition, there is the incontrovertible fact that the vast and over-
whelming majority of the *sag-i–verbs are deponent, and absolutely no
sane argument can be made that they all describe any “strong subject
involvement” (note that Le Mair claims this to be the semantic reason
behind deponence even synchronically within Old Irish, rather than
just diachronically). A coherent argument could be made that ‘seek’
in itself entails strong subject involvement and would therefore tend
to favour deponent inflection, but this would simply be rehashing an
old argument against which the age-old and obvious objection must be
made again that the base verb saigid, -saig is unequivocally not depo-
nent. In sum, I do not find Le Mair’s argument that deponence was
chosen synchronically in Old Irish for derived verbs based on the level
105
of subject involvement as traditionally attributed to the middle voice in

Indo-European to be compelling.
More recently, in a paper given at the 1st European Symposium for
Celtic Studies, Griffith (2013) has argued that the choice of deponence
depended originally — although now almost entirely obscured by the
profusion of later forms formed after the hyper-productivity of the
type had been established — on the formations being anticausatives,
adducing parallels from Albanian of how anticausatives can come to
be reinterpreted as [+activity] verbs marked with [−external argument]
and from there develop secondary, active meanings. Unfortunately, his
paper has yet reached article status (Griffith, p.c.), and I have only had
the handout from the conference to lean on, which makes it very diffi-
cult to evaluate the theory. At face value, however, his theory appears
to suffer from much the same weakness as Le Mair’s, namely that the
examples he cites (from Joseph 1987) as being “the likely locus of the
-igidir verbs” (Griffith 2013: 3), and which he claims are all (except pos-
sibly one) anticausatives: the transitive verb that meblugud ‘shaming’
presupposes (and which is not attested) is just as likely as not to not be
anticausative, and béoaigidir ‘makes alive, vivifies, revives, animates’ is
quite manifestly the exact opposite of an anticausative: it is semanti-
cally causative. Thus, I remain tentatively sceptic of Griffith’s hypothe-
sis, at least until it becomes available in more detail. *-sag-i–verbs must
remain one of those rare cases where the etymology is all but indisputa-
bly established, but the formation itself is still not fully understood from
a semantic point of view.
This chapter has hopefully made the point that the Old Irish period,
(in)famous for its unusually complex and arcane verbal system, is in
fact in many ways a period characterised by a series of hesitant attempts
to add regularity back into a system that was quickly degenerating and
falling apart at the seams as a result of pressure put on it by the bedlam
of phonetic changes that had occurred in the language; but also one
106
that lacked the required impetus to hurry on the despoliation of the

system in order to built a new and more sensible system from the ruins.
It is worth noting, of course, as McCone (1997: 167f.) is also careful
to point out, that Old Irish itself was likely a literary language for most
of its attested life span, perhaps even as far back as the dating of the
Würzburg glosses, rather than a contemporary vernacular. It is perhaps
even more worth noting that during the Middle and especially Modern
Irish periods, the gravely needed overhaul and simplification of the Old
Irish verbal system that had not yet built up a momentum to happen
during the (literature of the) Old Irish period did take place, and the
system emerged almost unrecognisably simplified and predictable.
107
Part 3
CONCLU-
SION
In this study, I have attempted to take a grand view of the prehistory

of the Irish language from its roots in Proto-Indo-European up until
the time in the 8th and 9th centuries when we begin to see consistent
and high-quality attestations of the language in the emerging Old Irish
literature.
My section on the Indo-European proto-language began with the real-

isation that the traditional view of the Indo-European verb as a system
that makes a fundamental distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘second-
ary’ verbs, based purely on formal criteria of word formation, but with
far-reaching consequences for the semantic possibilities inherent in
each type, really is quite unlikely. Much more reasonable is the suppo-
sition that these so-called ‘secondary verbs’ are in fact no more than so
many more in the already quite large group of ways any given root had
of forming an imperfective (present) conjugational stem.
Some careful sifting of large quantities of material extracted from
the most impressive statistical source available for the Indo-European
verbal system, the Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben, has allowed
me on the one hand to confirm what I am sure many intuitively feel,
namely that the Indo-European was characterised by a large number
of possible formation types, and not much by way of correspondence
between the difference formation types; and on the other, to adduce
one or two places where some level of predictable correspondence is to
be found after all.
Tendencies of productivity in the late Indo-European period seem
to have been that root presents (and aorists) had become stagnating,
though they still made up a large part of the inherited inventory; that
nasal presents were moderately productive, but perhaps no more than
that; and that both thematic presents and *-i̯e/o-presents were the work-
ing horses pulling the wheels of the Indo-European language with their
productivity and predictability. Most importantly, however, remains the
fact that the late Indo-European verb was not in all a very productive
system, but rather a disjointed patchwork of individual formations with
very little by way of paradigmatic productivity.
111
In dealing with the Proto-Celtic stage in the history of Irish, I quickly

discovered when attempting to look at Proto-Celtic from a synchronic
viewpoint that much of what is frequently ascribed to the Insular Celtic
stage and associated with a language in state of some phonetic and
morphological upheaval should really very likely be attributed to the
earlier, Proto-Celtic stage instead. Unlike the phonetic developments
which were by all accounts meagre in the Proto-Celtic period, it seems
the verbal system was characterised by a very high degree of innovation
and creativity tailored towards undoing the individualistic and unstruc-
tured verb inherited from Indo-European. More than half of the entire
verbal system seems to have been torn down and rebuilt into a more
symmetrical and robust system comprising a core of inherited and often
still quite unpredictable verbs, as well as several completely refashioned
and prêt-à-porter class packages well-suited to achieving paradigmatic
productivity and carry out the task of incorporating new material into
the existing verbal system.
In the same manner, sifting through the data and rooting out the facts
relevant to see the big lines regarding Insular Celtic forced a reevalua-
tion of the established preconceptions of it as a highly innovative and
especially phonetically quickly developing linguistic period. Contrary
to expectations, it emerged that Insular Celtic was a period of phonetic
stability when the sound changes that took place were trivial and rather
few in number. Morphologically, too, the only clear innovations were
the addition of the t-preterite and the emergence of a set of ‘neo-sec-
ondary’ non-presential personal endings. The biggest change to occur
in Insular Celtic was rather on a syntactic level, with the change from
underlyingly verb-final to quite strongly verb-initial clause structure
and the generalisation of a mandatory, but semantically null, particle in
the Wackernagel position.
Finally, in the last section, I have described in the Old Irish period a
conflicted linguistic period, where immense and cataclysmic sound
changes leading among other things to the phonemicisation of the ini-
tial consonant mutations conspired to create one of the most complex
112 and unpredictable verbal systems ever devised, but where attempts
to stem this flow towards verbal anarchy, while manifold, fell short of
causing a complete systematic breakdown like the one that occurred
in Proto-Celtic. Rather, the measures taken to endeavour to maintain a
workable system worked on a smaller scale and included instead many
smaller, individual analogies and reworkings.
Painting with a broad, cross-historical brush, it can be said that Jespers-

en’s Cycle, though often criticised and invalidated, fits the history of Irish
rather well. The comparison between the Middle Irish and the Proto-In-
do-Europeans is an easy one: both inherited verbal systems displaying
all the traces of having gone through a tumultuous phonetic upheaval
and had been rendered lopsided and confusing by it; both attempted to
remedy this by creating new, more transparent structures to hopefully
surpass the old and were at least partially successful; and both were
succeeded by a period — the Proto-Celtic period and the Modern Irish
period, respectively — which managed to gain the amount of momen-
tum needed to collapse the confusing system and shape a new one out
of the resulting jetsam and flotsam.
My goal with this thesis has been to see the language from a bird’s-eye
view, as it were, and focus on the large-scale eddies and fluctuations
that are constantly occurring in every single language on earth, slowly
shaping and moulding the burgeoning state of its future, rather than
focus on the minutiae that frequently end up being the focus of much
scholarship in historical linguistics.
In order to gain an overall view of the Irish language and how it has
vacillated and developed through time, I have focused on regularities
and patterns that may be carefully picked out from underneath the
debris of outdated theories, aspersed models, and discredited readings
that can so easily come to clutter and weigh down upon the fact the
object of our research was in fact living, evolving, and most of all used
languages, as full of regular and irregular patterns as the English we
speak today. I have distanced myself somewhat and kept in check my
historical linguist’s desire to enter into the fray and disappear under
a cover of dialect forms, phonetic correspondences, and finely tuned
sound laws. I have sought instead to gain and present a broad vision 113
of a language in constant change, and by extension, of the people who

spoke it and were faced with the same linguistic needs to be able to
express themselves in ever new ways.
I may only hope I have succeeded.

114
DANSK RESUME
Det er en af grundstenene i den historisk-sammenlignende sprogviden-

skab at uregelmæssige og uigennemskuelige former og paradigmer som
regel er af størst interesse inden for morfologien, da netop disse som
regel repræsenterer tidligere regelmæssige, men nu hedengangne, møn-
stre i sproget. En naturlig følge heraf er at den sammenlignende sprogvi-
denskab i meget høj grad har fokuseret på synkrone uregelmæssigheder
og nærmest helt skyet bort fra at se nærmere på de regelmæssige og
produktive dannelsesmønstre der – trods alt – udgør langt størstedelen
af et hvilketsomhelst levende, talt sprog.
Denne afhandling er et forsøg på at skabe et modikum af balance ved
at søge at følge udviklingen af netop de produktive dannelsesmønstre
inden for et afgrænset område; i dette tilfælde inden for verbalsystemet
fra protoindoeuropæisk og frem til oldirsk. Det er bredt accepteret at
det indoeuropæiske verbalsystem ikke på samme måde som det latin-
ske med sine fire grundbøjninger eller det germanske med sine pænt
afgrænsede underklasser af både stærke og svage verber kunne indde-
les i bøjningsklasser som sådan; således kan man heller ikke tale om
produktivitet på indoeuropæisk på et paradigmatisk niveau som sådan:
En given verbalrod kunne principielt danne et utal af stammedannelser
uafhængigt af hinanden. Gennem en granskning af de hyppigste stam-
medannelsesmønstre vil jeg dog her søge at påvise visse tendenser til
i det indoeuropæiske system til sammenhæng mellem bestemte typer
af stammedannelser, hvilket unægteligt må tros at ligge til grund for de
senere belagte klassesystemer.
Det protokeltiske verbum har hidtil ikke været genstand for megen
forskning som distinkt kategori, og produktive verbaldannelser i endnu
ringere grad. Dette forsøges udbedret her gennem en diskussion af de
ganske gennemgribende morfologiske ændringer og systematiseringer 115
det keltiske verbalsystem udgør i forhold til det indoeuropæiske – sys-

tematisk langt mere fundamentale og gennemgribende omkalfatringer
end hidtil beskrevet, om end de ledsagedes af en påfaldende fonetisk
konservatisme. Det fællesøkeltiske verbalsystem er der skrevet mere om
end det protokeltiske, men igen er der mig bekendt ikke gjort nogen
forsøg på at give et forkromet overblik over det økeltiske verbalsystem.
Der argumenteres her, stik imod den indoeuropæiske ‘barndomslære’,
for at det økeltiske verbalsystem faktisk på mange måder var mere mor-
fologisk konservativt end det protokeltiske, og at der skete forbavsende
lidt i den systematiske opbygning af det økeltiske verbalsystem.
Derimod gav den økeltiske periode startskuddet til en række lydlige
udviklinger som lå til grund for en senere voldsom omstrukturering af
systemet, ligesom en grundlæggende omstrukturering af sætningssyn-
taksen fandt sted her.
I afhandlingens sidste afsnit tages hul på disse lydlige og syntaktiske
udviklinger og det verbalsystem de fører frem til – et set ud fra det
indoeuropæiske, protokeltiske og økeltiske verbum ganske uigenkende-
ligt og højst uforudsigeligt af slagsen.
Formålet med denne afhandling er at vise, med så brede penselstrøg

som muligt, hvilke overordnede værktøjer de forskellige trin af det
sprog vi kender som irsk, har taget i brug for at skabe og/eller bevare et
verbalsystem der gav mening og var brugbart. Den sen-indoeuropæiske
periode og den oldirske periodes højst uforudsigelige og usystematiske
systemer ligner hinanden markant, og det er påfaldende at begge deres
efterfølgende perioder, protokeltisk og middelirsk, for at indregulere
verbet til et logisk og sammenhængende system måtte foranledige et
nærmest fuldstændigt sammenbrud af det tidligere system, i en nærm-
est cyklisk udvikling der henleder tankerne på Jespersens Cyklus. Hvor-
vidt moderne irsk vil videreføre denne cyklus med udviklinger der kan
afspejle de økeltiske, vil tiden vise.
116
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THE CY

INSTITUT FOR NORDISKE STUDIER OG SPROGVIDENSKAB

Kandidatspeciale af Janus Bahs Jacquet

Institut for Nordiske Studier og Sprogvidenskab

It is in the nature of speech and communication that every natural lan-

The field of historical, comparative linguistics in general, Indo-Euro-

what is most interesting for a comparative linguist is that which repre-

productive verb formation patterns throughout the history of the Irish

The nature of this thesis necessitates a lot of discussion about different

1 Primary, secondary, and tertiary

One fundamental distinction often drawn when attempting to catego-

Gegenstand dieser Arbeit sind die Primärverben oder ‘starken

Schumacher thus defines what constitutes a primary verb by equalling

The essential difference is that primary verbs are derived from a

12 the language phases between Proto-Indo- European and Old

Le Mair’s simple definition goes a long way towards arriving at an unam-

»» Underived formations are those which are formed directly to a

»» Derived formations are those which are formed to a root through

1 On a deeper level, I actually consider such forms to contain a derivational

though this may also be thought of as affixation) to be tertiary, as

In many cases, my definition of primary formations will tally with Le

14 the terminological and theoretical framework it builds upon should of course be

(strong/weak) as purely a morphological, inflectional dimension, and

2 Strong and weak inflections

This leads me neatly on to defining what in my view should be consid-

A strong inflection is a system of verb conjugation or noun/

to all strong forms, except that they are always counterpoints to

When describing verbs in Germanic languages, for example, it is cus-

Strong verbs show considerable inflectional diversity and are

It is undeniable, however, that there is a distinction in inflectional

different languages, but the actual categorising of concrete stem forma-

It seems to be almost universally accepted, though never outright

4 Note that suppletion always, irrespective of language, counts not as a “con-

18 categorising any verbal paradigm that forms a suppletive or otherwise irregular

Although self-evident, the fact must be admitted up front that pro-

3.1 Levels of productivity

productivity, I have compromised for the present study on the following

of paradigmatic productivity (see below) in English is to form 3sg.

3.2 Domains of productivity

formations within a stem, or even to individual forms within a given

»» Paradigmatic productivity refers to the relative productivity that

»» Stem productivity refers to the productivity enjoyed by any par-

»» Tense productivity is the productivity of a particular type of

22 ‘present table’. Similarly, what is frequently termed paradigmatic levelling is in

»» Form productivity refers to the productivity of any individual

3.3 Synchronic and diachronic productivity

productivity), diachronic productivity frequently, though not uniquely,8

The word “productivity” is often used synonymously with “fre-

Therefore, frequency can only be an imprecise indicator of

8 It is possible for a structure to remain at the same level of productivity

24 Germanic, for example, have remained prolifically productive as the primary,

3.4 A cyclical fluctuation of productivity

The history of negative expressions in various languages makes

in the course of time be subject to the same development as the

In Jespersen’s honour, I have decided to call this diachronic fluctuation

Part 2 is organised chronologically, starting with Proto-Indo-European,

1 The verbal system

1.1 Conjugational stems

[I]n one group of verbs, called primary verbs, the tense-stems

Since my definition of primacy differs from Fortson’s, his primary verbs

Unlike Fortson (and others with him, e.g., Schulze-Thulin 2001: 2,

Ein -o-éi̯e-Verbum ist gegenüber dem e-stufigen Grundverbum

zu σέβομαι ‘sich scheuen’ ← ‘vermeiden’ […]. (Schulze-Thulin

For earlier stages of Indo-European, and also in part synchronically in

› unreduplicated -si̯e/o- < desiderative -s- with secondary thema-

became x before s (McCone 1996: 43f.), which upset the transparency

enlarged by adding the athematic ending -mi, yielding -ūmi41 or in