Table 13

Direct traces of reduplication in OE are rare; they are sometimes found in the Anglian dialects and in poetry as extra consonants appearing in the Past tense forms: Past tense of hātan – heht alongside hēt ('call'), Past tense of ondr edan – ondrēd and ondrēord (NE dread).

To account for the interchanges of consonants in the strong verbs one should recall the voicing by Verner's Law and some subsequent changes of voiced and voiceless fricatives. The interchange [s~z] which arose under Verner's Law was transformed into [s~r] due to rhotacism and acquired another interchange [s~z] after the Early OE voicing of fricatives. Consequently, the verbs whose root ended in [s] or [z] could have the following interchange:

Verbs with an interdental fricative have similar variant with voiced and voiceless [θ, ð] and the consonant [d], which had developed from [ð] in the process of hardening:

Verbs with the root ending in [f/v] displayed the usual OE interchange of the voiced and voiceless positional variants of fricatives:

Verbs with consonant interchanges could belong to any class, provided that they contained a fricative consonant. That does not mean, however, that every verb with a fricative used a consonant interchange, for instance rīsan, a strong verb of Class 1, alternated [s] with [z] but not with [r]: rīsan – rās– rison – risen (NE rise). Towards the end of the OE period the consonant interchanges disappeared.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11