On gain and loss of verbal categories in language contact: Old English vs. Old High German

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On gain and loss of verbal categories in language contact

Old English vs. Old High German*

Theo VennemannUniversity of Munich, Germany

The theory of language change has in recent years increased its explanatory repertoire by pointing out the role of language contact in determining which paths of development are entered and followed under specified conditions. In particular, language shifting – as unmonitored second language learning – is recognized as a powerful mechanism for introducing new verbal categories into language systems as well as leading to the loss of verbal categories from language systems. In this paper I will relate several of the most important structural changes and categorial differences in the verb systems of Proto-Germanic, Old English and Old High German to the different contact histories of these languages, among them: (1) the reduction of the Proto-Indo-European TAM system (TAM for tense, aspect, mood) to half its size in Proto-Germanic, (2) the existence of a double copular paradigm in Old English (and again in Irish English) but not in German; (3) a number of properties of English but not of German attributed to Celtic influence by Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto (2008), such as the loss of the affected possessor construction and the rise of the verbal noun in -ung/-ing and the progressive based on it.

1. Introduction

In Old English and Old High German we find both identical and different basic verbal categories. Identical verbal categories come in two varieties: They may be inherited, and they may be owed to shared innovation. Different verbal categories may be owed to differential loss, i.e. loss in one of the two languages but not in the other. Thus, Old English had a 1st and 2nd person dual of the personal pronoun;

* I would like to thank Stephen Laker (Kyushu University, Japan), Robert Mailhammer (Arizona State University, Tempe), Iva Welscher (University of Munich) and an anonymous referee for reading manuscript versions of this paper and for making valuable suggestions.


Theo Vennemann

Old High German did not: it had lost this category. (English, too, lost it early in the Middle English period.) On the other hand, different verbal categories may also be owed to differential innovation. The question arises in each case whether the changes involved reflect ordinary internal language change or the effects of language contact. In the present paper I will deal especially with such changes for which I have reasons to assume an effect of language contact. I will not only discuss TAM categories (TAM for tense, aspect, and mood) but understand the term ‘verbal category’ loosely so as to include e.g. voice categories and categories of verbs.

. Shared inherited categories

The following were the TAM categories of Old English and Old High German before they began developments of their own, i.e. the major verbal categories of Proto-Germanic:

T (tense): present, preterite A (aspect): none M (mood): indicative, optative, imperative

The so-called present tense, which carries no inherent temporal meaning but by default indicates the time of the speech-act, is the continuation of the Proto-Indo-European simple imperfective aspect, likewise traditionally called the present tense.

The preterite of the so-called strong verbs continues the Proto-Indo-European perfect, which had the same imperfective aspectual force as the present but in addition characterized the focused state as the result of a past event.1 The latter property led to its re-interpretation as a past tense, following a universal unidirec-tional path of semantic development.2 In the course of losing this double-layered

1. Cf. Meier-Brügger 2010: F 202, 2; S 307: “Der Perfektstamm bezeichnet eine Art von resul-tativem Aspekt. … Wie der Indikativ Präsens nimmt das Perfekt Bezug auf die Zeitstufe der Gegenwart; dabei bezeichnet das Perfekt den nach einem vorausgegangenen Verbalgeschehen erreichten Zustand am Subjekt (die Ziege hat gefressen = ‘die Ziege ist satt’).” [The perfect stem indicates a kind of resultative aspect. … Just like the indicative present the perfect refers to the present time; in so doing the perfect indicates the state of the subject reached after the event expressed by the verb (the goat has eaten = ‘the goat is full up’).]

. Speaking about categories (as opposed to individual forms and to extended usage), a perfect may become a preterite, but I know of no case of a preterite becoming a perfect.


On gain and loss of verbal categories in language contact 1

semantics – present imperfective on the surface, but with an embedded reference to a past event – the perfects of the individual verbs for the most part preserved the embedded semantics and became preterites. But a minority preserved the upper layer present imperfective semantics; they became the so-called perfecto-present or preterite-present verbs. Formally the Germanic preterites and preterite- presents reflect the Proto-Indo-European perfect both in its ablaut behavior (with different grades in the singular and plural indicative) and in its residual reduplication (in class VII).

As to the moods, indicative and imperative continue the same Indo- European categories. The same holds for the optative, except that in Germanic, especially in the individual Germanic languages, the category has acquired additional func-tions and is therefore usually named differently (e.g. subjunctive, Konjunktiv, Möglichkeitsform).

Concerning the TAM categories of Proto-Indo-European, the various intro-ductions to the field show slight differences. The ten categories identified in Mailhammer 2006 are probably close to the mark. In addition to the five categories already mentioned (present, perfect, indicative, optative, imperative), there was a perfective category, the aorist, and the injunctive, a form without any temporal ref-erence which is nonetheless placed among the temporal categories by some linguists (e.g. Mailhammer 2006) but among the moods by others (e.g. Beekes 1995: 245).

The preterite, formed with a prefix +h1e- (called “the augment”), occurs only in the following Indo-European branches: Greek, Phrygian, Armenian, Indo- Iranian (cf. Meier-Brügger 2000: §F 213). Whether Proto-Indo-European possessed a pluperfect is uncertain (cf. Beekes 1995: 239).

Table 1 summarizes the development of the Germanic TAM categories from the Proto-Indo-European TAM system. The left column shows the Proto-Indo-European categories as considered in Mailhammer 2006, the second and third col-umns show the Germanic TAM categories. Those Indo-European TAM categories which survived into Proto-Germanic are printed recte, those lost in the process, in italics.

The most remarkable changes occurred in the aspectual group. The aorist, the only perfective category, was lost without a trace. The perfect took over some of its load and formed a new opposition with the inherited present imperfective, an aspectual opposition of present imperfective vs. past perfective which, still in pre-historic times, developed into a temporal opposition of present vs. preterite. The latter change, a natural kind of development, was probably invited or facilitated by the loss of all old temporal categories, to the extent that they existed in the source language. In the modal group the subjunctive was lost, its functions taken over by the optative and by the indicative.


Theo Vennemann

Table 1. Major verbal categories (TAM categories) in Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, and Phoenician3

Indo-European Germanic Phoenician

Aspectual Aspectual Temporal Aspectual

Imperfective:Present ⇒ Imperfective > Present Imperfective

Perfect ⇒ Perfective > Preterite Perfective

Perfective:Aorist ⇒ ∅

temporalInjunctive ⇒ ∅Imperfect ⇒ ∅Pluperfect ⇒ ∅

modal modal modalIndicative ⇒ Indicative Indicative

Optative ⇒ Optative Jussive3

Subjunctive ⇒ ∅Imperative ⇒ Imperative Imperative

This remarkable reduction of the TAM system in Germanic has often been com-mented on. Except for general remarks bringing the possibility of language contact (“substrate influence”) into play, no specific explanation can be found in the intro-ductions to Germanic. The only explanation in existence presupposes the theory that Germania in her prehistory was for several centuries under intensive Semitic, namely Phoenician (Carthaginian), influence (for which cf. Vennemann 2000, 2004a and earlier articles in Vennemann 2003). The application to the TAM system itself

. The functions of the optative and the jussive moods are rather similar. Their mean-ings overlap in the expression of wishing. This is especially clear in the comparison on the Internet page “Grammatical mood”, ⟨http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood⟩ (22 September 2010): “The optative mood expresses hopes, wishes or commands and has other uses that may overlap with the subjunctive mood.” “The jussive mood expresses pleading, insistence, imploring, self-encouragement, wishing, desiring, intention, com-manding, purpose or consequence.” It is thus natural for a speaker of a language with the jussive mood to equate it with the optative of a language to be learned.



was proposed by Mailhammer (2006). He compared the Proto-Indo-European and Germanic TAM categories to those of Carthaginian Phoenician (Punic) and found that the latter are essentially the same as those Proto-Indo-European categories that survived into Germanic. The assumption is that Punic second-language learners of pre-Germanic learned the pre-Germanic (Proto-Indo-European) TAM system through the “filter” of their own native language, which meant that they understood and learned only those categories that they knew from their previous, native experi-ence, ignoring all others. The subsequent events then were the same as in the gener-alization and functionalisation of ablaut which I sketched in Vennemann 1998 and which Mailhammer (2006, 2007) worked out in great detail:

In this way they [the superstratal speakers of Atlantic Semitic, later identified as Carthaginian Phoenician (Punic)] created dialects of Germanic that were likewise characterized by a powerful verbal and deverbal ablaut system. These new dialects were spoken in part by members of those social groups that included the former superstratum speakers, which suggests that they became prestige dialects. As prestige dialects they superseded in time all the other pre-Germanic dialects and formed the basis for the emerging Proto-Germanic language. (Vennemann 1998: 42)

. Shared innovated categories

The two TAM categories that both English and German have innovated are the periphrastic perfect and the periphrastic future, together with their derived subcat-egories such as the past perfect (pluperfect) and the future perfect (second future). Also a new voice category, the passive, begins developing in both Old English and Old High German. Both languages show periphrastic expressions leading to the rise of these new categories (cf. e.g. Blake 1996: 99f; Besch & Wolf 2009: 150). The fact that the infinite forms involved in these constructions are increasingly used without their agreement inflection shows that the grammaticalisation of these TAM categories is well underway. Besch and Wolf specifically say about the Old High German passive and perfect:

Wichtig ist, daß es bei all diesen Fügungen zunächst nicht um eine Unterscheidung von Diathesen oder Tempora ging. “Der Vorgang, der zur Verfassung des Subjekts führt”, die eben durch das Partizip ausgedrückt wird, “ist nur dadurch in der Aussage enthalten, dass den Verben werdan und wesan kein Adjektiv oder Substantiv, sondern ein Verbaladjektiv folgt.” (Rupp 1956 282) … Je nach Valenz des mutativen Verbs entsteht eine passivische oder perfektivische Fügung. (Besch & Wolf 2009: 150)


Theo Vennemann

[It is important to realize that the purpose of all these constructions is not a differentiation of voices or tenses. “The process leading to the specific state of the subject”, which is expressed precisely by the participle, “is contained in the predication only by virtue of the fact that the verbs werdan and wesan are followed by a verbal adjective rather than an adjective or noun.” (Rupp 1956: 282) … Depending on the valency of the mutative verb the result is a passive or a perfect construction.]

The full integration of the new categories into the verbal systems postdates Old English and Old High German. This assessment is in harmony with Mailhammer and Smirnova’s conclusion (this volume):

As we have shown and as the data confirms, Old English as well as Old High German did not possess grammaticalised passive periphrases. Constructions with the copula verbs ‘be’ and ‘become’ plus past participles served as fully compositional structures with primary aspectual meaning whose passive readings resulted from the logical combination of the aspectual and transitivity values of their composite parts. But there is indication of a beginning process of grammaticalisation in Late Old English and Late Old High German. (Mailhammer & Smirnova, this volume, p. 66)

. Differential innovated categories

.1 Two copulas

I said in the Introduction that I will understand sets of verbal categories loosely both in the sense of grammatical categories expressed on verbs and of lexical categories of verbs. The first example I will discuss in this section belongs to the second group: the category of copular verbs.4

Proto-Germanic, as indeed Proto-Indo-European, had only a single copula.5 This may not strike anyone as peculiar, because the same is true for Contemporary

. This exposition follows Vennemann 2010: Section 2.

. Like several other Indo-European languages (Italic, Celtic, Lithuanian, Slavic, Greek, Old Indic), Proto-Germanic may have had forms derived from Proto-Indo-European +bheu-/+bhū- ‘to become’. There is no evidence, however, that these forms developed within Proto-Germanic into a copular paradigm meaning ‘to be’ the way this happened in Old English (and possibly in all of West Germanic, see below). Seebold (1970: s.v. *beww-), who does make this assumption, faces the problem that no such paradigm and, indeed, no b-forms meaning ‘to be’ at all, exist in Gothic and in Old Norse; he writes, without further discussion, “beseitigt im Gotischen und Nordischen” [eliminated in Gothic and Old Norse]. In the light of all the problems Seebold



English as well as the English of Shakespeare and of Chaucer. It is also true – see Table 2 – for historical North and East Germanic, as evident in the single Old Norse and Gothic present indicative paradigms translating the forms of English to be. But it is not true for Old English.

Table 2. A single copula in Proto-Indo-European and in Proto-Germanic (the s-paradigm)6

Old Icelandic Gothic

em im ‘(I) am’es(t) is ‘(thou) art’es ist ‘(he/she/it) is’

erom sijum ‘(we) are’eroð sijuþ ‘(you) are’ero sind ‘(they) are’

.1.1 Two copulas in Old EnglishAll Old English dialects had, from the time of their earliest attestation, two cop-ulas, the s-copula7 and the b-copula,8 each with a complete present indicative, optative, and imperative paradigm of which I show the West Saxon indicative sub-paradigms in Table 3.

Table 3. Two copulas in Old English (West Saxon)

(1970: s.v. *beww-) has accounting for +bheu-/+bhū- ‘to become’ in West Germanic, it seems equally possible, and to me more likely, that Gothic and Old Norse reflect the Proto-Germanic situation and that the West Germanic b-forms are entirely owed to Celtic influence. Krahe (1967: § 98) too traces the West Germanic copular b- directly to Proto-Indo-European. E.g. he derives Old English bēo via West Germanic 1st sing. pres. *biu from Proto-Indo-European *bheuō. This is not cogent; cf. Old Irish bíuu/.bíu below, Note 10.

. I call this paradigm the s-paradigm because it is, with certain irregularities, the etymo-logical continuation of the present of the Indo-European copula, based on the root +h1es-: sing. +h1és-mi, +h1és-si > +h1ési, +h1és-ti, plur. +h1s-més, +h1s-té, +h1s-énti (cf. Sihler 1995: § 492).

. See the preceding note.

. I call this copular paradigm the b-paradigm because it is based on the Indo-European root +bheu- and Proto-Indo-European +bh became +b in Germanic (and Celtic, see below). Whereas +h1es- inflected as a present/imperfect, +bheu- was aoristic, probably because its original meaning was ‘to become’ rather than ‘to be’ (Sihler 1995: § 491). – A very detailed description of the West Germanic, especially Old English copula paradigms is Flasdieck 1937.


Theo Vennemann

s-paradigm b-paradigm

eom bēo ‘(I) am’eart bist ‘(thou) art’is biþ ‘(he/she/it) is’

sind(on) bēoþ ‘(we/you/they) are’

Of these, the s- or eom-paradigm is recognizably a formal continuation of the Germanic paradigm also reflected in Old Norse and Gothic, while the b- or bēo-paradigm is an innovation. As to the meaning of these two copulas in Old English, Campbell writes:

bēo expresses what is (a) an invariable fact, e.g. ne bið swylc cwenlic þeaw [Beowulf 1940] ‘such is not a queenly custom’, or (b) the future, e.g. ne bið þe wilna gad [Beowulf 660] ‘you will have no lack of pleasures’, or (c) iterative extension into the future, e.g. bið storma gehwylc aswefed [Phoenix 185–6] ‘every storm is always allayed’ (i.e. on all occasions of the flight of the Phoenix, past and to come); eom expresses a present state provided its continuance is not especially regarded, e.g. wlitig is se wong [Phoenix 7] ‘the plain is beautiful’. (Campbell 1959: 350)

The DOE (s.v. bēon) too lists three different types of usage distinctions for the s- and the b-paradigm, (a) present vs. future, (b) statal vs. actional, and (c) non-durative vs. durative.9 – The distinction did not last in the history of English. Rather, it “is abandoned in early Middle English, earlier in Northern than in Southern and Southwestern texts (see MED s.v. bēn, OED s.v. be, Jost 1909: 139f; Brunner 1962: 277–9).” (Lutz 2009: 233, Note 19).

.1. Two copulas in CelticThis un-Germanic twofold paradigm for the copula was explained as a contact phenomenon as early as 1925, when Keller pointed to the formal similarity of the bēo-paradigm with the b-paradigm of the Celtic languages, for which see the Middle Welsh paradigm in Table 4.

Whereas the Celtic s-paradigm rarely shows its s anymore, owing to intense phonological change, the b-paradigm is clearly recognizable as such in all Insular

. Cf. also Bolze (this volume).



Celtic languages. – As to the origin and meaning of the Celtic paradigms, Lewis and Pedersen state:

The paradigm of the verb ‘to be’ consists in Italo-Celtic of forms of the roots *es- and *bheu-. In Celtic a pres[ent] stem *bhwī-, *bhwije-, derived from *bheu-, also appears. This latter present denotes either a praesens consuetudinale or a future, a natural development from an orig[inal] meaning ‘to become’ (Lat. fíō). The same root is also used in the subjunctive. (Lewis & Pedersen 1989: § 476.1)

The paradigms added to the inherited s-paradigm in Old English and in Middle Welsh are remarkably similar both as to form and to meaning, cf. Table 5.

Table 5. Comparison of the Middle Welsh and the Old English b-paradigms

Middle Welsh Old English

b-paradigm b-paradigmbydaf bēo ‘(I) am’bydy bist ‘(thou) art’byd [biþ] biþ ‘he/she/it) is’

bydwn bēoþ ‘(we) are’bydwch “ ‘(you) are’bydant “ ‘(they) are’

All forms in the paradigm of both languages begin with a b- followed by a front vowel; note especially the phonetic identity of the most frequently used forms, the 3rd person singular. And the meanings formulated by the specialists – ‘(a) an invariable fact … or (b) the future … or (c) iterative exten-sion into the future’ in Old English and ‘a praesens consuetudinale or a future’

Table 4. Two copulas in Middle Welsh

s-paradigm b-paradigm

wyf bydaf ‘(I) am’wyt bydy ‘(thou) art’yw byd ‘(he/she/it) is’

ym bydwn ‘(we) are’ywch bydwch ‘(you) are’ynt bydant ‘(they) are’


Theo Vennemann

for Celtic – are close enough to invite the idea that the innovations did not arise independently.10

Keller’s 1925 proposal was published in German, as was Preusler 1956 where numerous Celtic features of English, including the b-paradigm, are discussed. Flasdieck (1937), likewise publishing in German, thought that the preservation of the b-forms in England may have been furthered by the contact with the Celtic population.11 But he rejects Keller’s idea that the Old English forms were taken over from Brittonic, viz. that they originated in the manner of thinking and speak-ing of Anglicized Britons.12 The reasons for his assumption of support but not carry-over from Celtic are, however, not very convincing.13

1. Ahlqvist (2010), in his section “To ‘be’ in Celtic and English” (pp. 50–58), lists all the rel-evant paradigms of the Insular Celtic languages (pp. 53–55), which show that certain forms of the Irish b-paradigm are even more similar to the Old English one. This becomes interesting especially in the context of Schrijver’s view that the Celtic contact language of Anglo-Saxon was an old form of Irish rather than of Welsh (Schrijver 2009: 208): “The original language of the shifting population [shifting from Celtic to Anglo-Saxon] can now be identified as a variety of Celtic which was ancestral to Old Irish.” E.g. the Old Irish 1st person singular “consuetudinal present indicative” is bíuu in the absolute and ⋅ bíu in the conjunct paradigm (Ahlqvist 2010: 55). – Trudgill (2010: 25–27), in his socio-linguistic perspective, approvingly cites Ahlqvist 2010, as well as other authors relating the Old English and Celtic b-paradigms as a contact phenomenon.

11. “In der neuen Heimat mag die Erhaltung überdies gefördert worden sein durch das Zusammentreffen mit der kelt[ischen] Bevölkerung.” (Flasdieck 1937: 332f.) [In the new homeland, the preservation (of the b-forms) may furthermore have been supported by the encounter with the Celtic population.].

1. “Die altenglischen Formen und Funktionen der Wurzel *bheu, die den anderen ger-manischen Dialekten fremd sind, entstanden im Munde und im Denken von englisch sprech-enden Briten.” (Keller 1925: 60) [The Old English forms and functions of the root *bheu, which do not occur in the other Germanic dialects, originated in the mouths and the thinking of English-speaking Britons.] Using Keller’s own words, Flasdieck replied: “Indes wird man nicht die a[lt]e[nglischen] Formen mit Keller als Entlehnung aus dem Brit[ischen], entstanden im Denken und Sprechen von englisch redenden Briten, ansehen dürfen.” (Flasdieck 1937: 333) [However, one will not be allowed to consider the Old English forms with Keller as borrow-ings from British, arising from the thinking and parlance of English-speaking Britons.] By contrast, Preusler (1956: 324) cites Keller’s statement approvingly (“m.e. mit recht” [in my opinion with justification]).

1. “Auch das A[lt]s[ächsische] kennt die längere Erhaltung von *bheu; der Abbau von *bheu erfolgt gerade im Norden Englands; überdies fehlt dem A[lt]e[nglischen] ein Prät[eritum] zu *bheu, wie es das Kelt[ische] kennt.” (Flasdieck 1937: 333) [In Old Saxon too, *bheu was pre-served longer; it was in the north of England where the decline of *bheu happened. Besides, Old English lacks a preterite of *bheu, which Celtic has.].



In any event, Keller (1925), Flasdieck (1937), and Preusler (1956) were three authors reckoning with Celtic influence in the development of the Anglo-Saxon b-paradigm, all three writing in German. The earliest proposal in English I have found is Tolkien’s (1963: 30–32).14 Tolkien refers to none of his German predeces-sors. As it happened, he himself did not fare much better: “[Tolkien’s account] seems not to have been, either noticed very much, or, perhaps, rather, not taken very seriously by English language scholars.” (Ahlqvist 2010: 52).

As is well known, the continental West Germanic languages too have b-forms in their copular paradigm; see Table 6. But what they do not have is two distinct copular paradigms, such as the Old English ones; nor do we possess any evidence that there ever were two distinct paradigms.

Table 6. A single copula in Continental West Germanic, combining s- and b-forms

Frisian Old Saxon Old High German

bim bium bimbist bist

is is ist

sind sind(um) birumbirutsint

There are two interpretations of this situation. Schumacher (2007) sees the b-forms in Frisian and German as evidence for a separate, contact-induced prehis-toric pan-West Germanic b-paradigm of Celtic origin which was conflated with the inherited s-paradigm before the earliest Frisian and German attestation but preserved in Anglo-Saxon owing to the continued contact with Celtic. This view is considered unlikely by Lutz (2009). She assumes borrowing of individual b-forms into the pre-West Germanic s-paradigms, arguing as follows: Contact-induced grammatical categories do not result from borrowing but through language-shifting; therefore Schumacher’s assumption that a second copular paradigm was transferred from Celtic into pre-West Germanic presupposes that the West Germanic peoples are for the most part Celts who learned Germanic. But there is

1. I had planned to quote at some length from Tolkien’s excellent article. This was rendered superfluous by Ahlqvist 2010 where Tolkien’s entire account of the b-paradigm, including footnotes, is reproduced verbatim on pp. 50f.


Theo Vennemann

no independent evidence for this to be true – except of course in the case of the English. On the contrary: the evidence we have for prehistoric Celtic-Germanic contacts – lexical evidence – has been interpreted as pointing toward a dominant position of the Celts in relation to the early Germans. Thus Schuhmacher’s view cannot be maintained, unless one overturns the traditional view of the relation-ship between the Celtic and Germanic populations and assumes language shift-ing instead of, or besides, borrowing.

I need not take sides in this controversy here. But I would like to contribute one argument possibly useful in resolving this issue that neither Schuhmacher nor Lutz took into consideration: English and Celtic share other syntactic prop-erties which have been interpreted as transfers from the Celtic substrate to the Anglo-Saxon superstrate in language shifting. But all of these only unfold in the history of the language, reaching some sort of stable grammatical status only in Middle or Early Modern English.15 Not so the double copular paradigm: It is fully established in Old English from the very beginning and in all dialects; and it is the only Anglo-Saxon morpho-syntactic feature traced to Celtic that has this property.

One way to interpret this singular feature is to assume that it belonged to Anglo-Saxon from the beginning of its existence, i.e. that the Anglo-Saxons brought it to the Isles from the Continent. The simplest way to embed this hypothesis is to assume that Continental West Germanic possessed the double copular paradigm at the time of the invasion of Britain by several of those West Germanic tribes in the middle of the 5th century. Those West Germanic tribes staying on the Continent then conflated the two copular paradigms into a single one when the contact with Celtic faded and eventually stopped, so that when their languages were first committed to writing they only each possessed the one mixed paradigm each shown in Table 6. By contrast, the West Germanic tribes leaving for Britain renewed contact with Celtic in their new environments, thus stabilizing and preserving their dual copular paradigm for several centuries, until their contact with Celtic too faded and they too conflated the two copular paradigms into a single one. E.g. the paradigm resulting in the standard lan-guages consists mostly of the Germanic s-paradigm forms but conspicuously contains three b-forms, the infinitive and imperative be, the present participle and gerund being, and the past participle been.16 – This interpretation combines elements of both Schuhmacher’s and Lutz’s lines of argumentation: It assumes

1. Cf. Section 3.2 below.

1. Stephen Laker informs me that “some dialects settled only on the b-forms, especially in the southwest.”



the two copular paradigms for all prehistoric West Germanic languages and accepts the consequence that the West Germanic population consists to a con-siderable extent of Celts who shifted from Celtic to Germanic. West Germanic is Germanic in the mouths of Celts.17

The Frisian and German b-forms are important for yet a very different reason: They show that not only Insular Celtic but also Continental Celtic had b-forms, and by implication that the Celtic separate b-paradigm already existed, and hence originated, on the Continent.18 It did not originate in the Isles but was taken there by those Celts who left the Continent for the Isles. This has no further importance for the question we are discussing here, which is why Old English and Old High German differ with regard to the copular category: That question is answered both by Schuhmacher’s and by Lutz’s interpretation, namely by reference to the specific substratal Celtic influence which English was exposed to in the Isles and which all West Germanic languages remaining on the Continent, including Old High German, were exempt from. However, the con-clusion that Celtic already possessed the double copular paradigm on the Con-tinent is important for the question which arises next, namely how the Celtic languages themselves acquired the double paradigm. The answer published in my 2010 handbook article is: Celtic acquired it in the same way that Anglo-Saxon acquired it, namely on its pre-Celtic, pre-Indo-European substrate, as suggested by the well-known fact that not only Celtic but also all western Romance lan-guages had once, or still have, two copular paradigms (best known, of course, from Spanish where the correct use of ser and estar is one of the great hurdles for second language learners). See Table 7.

1. The Celts referred to here were, of course, speakers of “Continental Celtic”, which was an Indo-European language developed on a Vasconic substratum (cf. Vennemann 2010 and references given there). The Celtic languages of the Isles, “Insular Celtic”, were very dif-ferent, having further developed on the pre-Celtic Hamito-Semitic substratum of the Isles, according to the theory of Morris Jones 1900; Pokorny 1927–1930; Gensler 1993 and others, cf. several of the chapters of Vennemann 2003. Thus the Celtic implied in my mnemonic sentences “West Germanic is Germanic in the mouths of Celts” and “English is Coastal West Germanic in the mouths of Celts” (Vennemann 2004b) must be understood accordingly for these formulas to make sense, with Continental Celts in the first sentence and Insular Celts in the second.

1. The actual attestation is meager, but forms with the basic meaning of ‘be’ do seem to have occurred in Gaulish inscriptions, cf. Lambert 1997: buetid in “deuuorbuetid, composé du verbe etre” (p. 146), “bueθ = irl. bes, ‘qui serait’, subj. prés. 3sg. *buet + s(e), particule relative” (p. 67); also p. 63, in particular 3rd sing. future bissiet ‘il sera’.


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Table 7. Romance languages with two copulas

PortugueseGalicianCastilianCatalanItalianSicilianOld French

not Romanianwestern Romance languages

Thus, the two-copula syntax is a feature of those western Indo-European languages – see Table 8 – for which a Vasconic substrate is likely for independent reasons.

Table 8. Languages with two copulas in Europe

West Germanic(Western) CelticWestern RomanceLanguages with Vasconic substrate

Basque has two copulas, izan and egon, which are used in similar ways as Spanish ser and estar. E.g. Etxepare (2003) begins the section “Copular construc-tions” with the following description:

Basque makes a distinction between stage-level predications (those which attribute some transitory property to the subject of predication) and individual-level predications (those which attribute some standing property to the subject of predication) in the auxiliary selected to express them. Transient properties are assigned by the verb egon ‘be in a location’, whereas standing properties are assigned through the verb izan ‘be’. The distinction … is reminiscent of the one found in Spanish between ser and estar … Izan is also used in equative sentences. (Etxepare 2003: 365)

de Azkue (1984: s.vv.) provides, besides French être for both, the following Spanish equivalents, each as the first (10) of several translations, where ‘(c)’ indicates that the item is ‘común … á toda la lengua’:

IZAN … 10 (c) ‘ser’ EGON 10 (c) ‘estar’



Thus it is quite conceivable that this non-Indo-European typological trait was imported into West Indo-European by the Old European language shifters shift-ing from Vasconic to Indo-European.

In concluding this section, I would like to point to the fact that there exists very fine indirect confirmation for the substrate account: Whereas Standard English gave up the Old English double copula syntax by conflating the two copu-lar paradigms into one, Irish English has in recent centuries developed new dou-ble copula paradigms on its Celtic substratum in Ireland, see Hickey 2007: 141, 173, 213–237.

. Other categorial differences

I have dealt with the double copula paradigm at some length because it is peculiar among the categorial features differentiating the Old English verbal system from the Old High German one.

One property which sets this feature aside is the fact that it has not survived into Modern English, for which I have no explanation, especially since it has remained fully alive in Celtic, as well as in the western Romance languages except French. Another property that sets the double copula paradigm feature aside among the features attributed to Celtic influence is the fact that it is the only one that is fully fledged even in the earliest Old English. This has been remarked on, at least in comparison with one other such feature, by Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto (2008: 60): “There is a clear chronological difference between the emergence of the OE is/bið distinction [i.e. the emergence of the double copula syntax, T.V.], which is already found in OE literary sources, and the rise of the P[rogressive] F[orm] in M[iddle] E[nglish].”

But what really makes the double copula paradigm feature special is the fact that it is the only feature attributed to Celtic influence that can be traced to the Continent and there, at least in my analysis, to pre-Indo-European Old European, with the same categorial differentiation found in Basque. All other categorial Old English innovations attributed to Celtic influence are Insular Celtic features, i.e. such features that have parallels not in Continental Old European but in the Semitic languages and must therefore be assumed to have originated in the Celtic Isles. – The following grammatical features of English are those considered likely to be of Celtic origin by Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto (2008):

1. The internal vs. external possessor construction (pp. 30–40)2. The Old English distinction between *es- and *bheu-forms of the verb ‘be’

(pp. 40–42)3. The Northern Subject Rule (pp. 42–49)


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4. Periphrastic do (pp. 49–59)5. The progressive (or -ing) form (59–72)6. The cleft construction (pp. 72–84)7. Relative clause structure (pp. 84–94)8. Other grammatical features with possible Celtic origin (pp. 95–118) 8.1. The development of self-forms as intensifiers and reflexives (pp. 95–97) 8.2. Comparative nor (pp. 98–102) 8.3. The Cumbric score (pp. 102–105) 8.4. Pronoun exchange and other related phenomena (pp. 105–118)

I will briefly look at them in this order, even though not all of them fall clearly under the heading of verbal categories.

Ad 1. The internal vs. external possessor constructionEnglish has lost nearly all dative constructions except those governed by three-place verbs such as to give, She gave him some money. In particular, it lost the sym-pathetic dative of the external possessor construction, i.e. the dative in locutions such as (1) and (2), where German still uses the possessor-phrase external dative but English has to use the possessor-phrase internal genitive.

(1) Dann stach ihm jemand die Augen aus. then gouged him someone the eyes out DATIVE Then someone gouged out his eyes. GENITIVE

(2) Dann wurde Balders Pferd das/sein Bein verrenkt. Then was to Balder’s horse the/its leg wrenched DATIVE Then the leg of Balder’s horse was wrenched.19

GENITIVE

Old English, by contrast, did have the external possessor construction with the sympathetic dative, as in (3), and so did, of course, Old High German, cf. (4), together with all Continental European languages.

(3) Þa sticode him mon þa eagan ut20

then gouged him someone the eyes out DATIVE ‘Then someone gauged out his eyes.’

1. I.e., ‘Then Balder’s horse sprained its leg’.

. Orosius, late 9th century.



(4) du uuart demo balderes uolon sin uuoz birenkit21

then was to Balder’s horse its leg wrenched DATIVE ‘Then Balder’s horse sprained its leg.’

English lost the construction in the Middle English period: “This construc-tion, common in OE …, is comparatively infrequent in ME and loses ground steadily.” (Mustanoja 1960: 98) Following the lead of Pokorny (1927–30: 16.253) in Vennemann 2002, I explained the loss of the external possessor construction in English by the language shift of the Insular Celtic substrate speakers, who did not have the external possessor construction, and the loss of the external possessor construction in Insular Celtic by the language shift of the pre-Celtic Semitic sub-strate speakers of the Isles, who did not have the external possessor construction either; no ancient Semitic language had it. – A related topic is the excessive use English makes of possession marking, as in (5).

(5) Peter put his hands in his pockets. Not: Peter put the hands in the pockets.

This is completely un-Germanic, cf. the German equivalent of (5) in (6).

(6) Peter steckte die Hände in die Tasche. ??Peter steckte seine Hände in seine Tasche.

But it is both Insular Celtic and Semitic. – Returning to the list of grammatical features of English considered likely by Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto (2008) to be of Celtic origin, we can skip point 2 because we have discussed it at length.

Ad 3. The Northern Subject RuleThis special subject-verb agreement rule of the Northern and North-Midland dia-lects, fully established when attested in Middle English, was undoubtedly a dialect feature of oral Old English. It too has been attributed to Insular Celtic influence, cf. Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto 2008: 46–49, and further to Semitic influence, cf. my 2001 paper.

Ad 4. Periphrastic doPeriphrastic do is first attested in Middle English and only develops into a gram-matical system in Modern English. Even though the evidence for a Celtic origin of the construction is strong (cf. Filppula, Klemola & Paulasto 2008: 59) and its

1. Second Merseburg charm, 9th or 10th century. – The possessive genitive sin ‘its’ is here used redundantly, as is also possible in Modern German; der ‘the’ would be equally gram-matical (and, indeed, better style).


Theo Vennemann

occurrence at least in oral Old English is predicted by the theory, I will not treat it here where the focus is on Old English.

Ad 5. The progressive (or -ing) formThe progressive based on the verbal noun (terminating in -unge or -inge), unique in the Germanic world, is not a feature of Old English but only of Middle and Modern English. What is found in Old English is a construction with the present participle terminating in -ande or -ende. However, the latter construction is not specifically English:

The origin of the E[xpanded] F[orm] in Old English can be explained in several ways. Of special interest are constructions with a predicative adjective and with an appositive participle, …, and the influence of periphrastic locutions resembling the E[xpanded] F[orm]. These factors, however, were also present in other Germanic languages in which the E[xpanded] F[orm] was not developed and thus do not explain the unique position of Old English in this respect. (Nickel 1966: 392)

More specifically, Aronstein said, nearly a hundred years ago, with reference to the combination of wesan/bēon and the present participle in -ende:

Die verbindung der verba des seins mit dem part[izip] praes[ens] findet sich in allen indoeuropäischen sprachen. […] Im Mittelhochdeutschen ist sie nicht selten bis in das 15. jahrh[undert] und verschwindet dann mehr und mehr. […] Im Neuhochdeutschen ist der gebrauch ausgestorben. (Aronstein 1918: 5f.)

[The combination of the verbs of being with the present participle is found in all Indo-European languages. […] It is not infrequent in Middle High German until the 15th century but then disappears more and more. […] Its use dies out in New High German.]

Aronstein explains the remarkable fact of its survival in English by reference to a development specific to this language:

Im Englischen dagegen ist sie nicht bloß aus der älteren sprache in die neuere übergegangen, sondern hat eine große erweiterung erfahren, sowohl was die häufigkeit als den umfang des gebrauchs angeht. Der äußere anlaß hierzu liegt offenbar darin, daß im Englischen wohl durch den einfluß des Französischen, wo part. pres. und gerundium zusammenfielen, gegen ende des 12. jahrh. das a[lt]e[nglische] part. prs. auf -ende, m[ittel]e[nglisch] -inde oder -ende zuerst in den südlichen mundarten und allmählich auch im norden durch die form auf -ing (ae. -ung) verdrängt worden ist, die zugleich die endung des verbalsubstantivs war und dem deutschen -ung in ‘teilung’, ‘wirkung’ etc. entspricht. So wären also verschiedene funktionen in einer form vereinigt worden, die auf diese weise eine besondere bedeutung erlangt hätte. (Aronstein 1918: 5f.)



[In English, by contrast, it did not merely pass on from the older into the more recent language but was greatly expanded, both in its frequency and the scope of its use. The external cause for this seems to have been the influence of French, where the present participle and the gerund were the same: Toward the end of the 12th century, beginning in the southern dialects but gradually spreading to the north, the Old English present participle in -ende, Middle English -inde or -ende, was ousted by the form in -ing (Old English -ung), which was at the same time the termination of the verbal noun and which corresponds to the German -ung in teilung, wirkung etc. In this way different functions were united in a single form, which thus attained special significance.]

This account is correct in its descriptive part. But the ascription of the loss of the present participle form in -inde/-ende to French influence, namely to the fact that in French the present participle in -ant (e.g. achetant ‘buying’) was also used as a gérondif (e.g. en achetant ‘in/by/while buying’), is less convincing. Together with Preusler (1956: 327–331, 331–334), Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto (2008: 59–72) and others, I consider Celtic influence more likely:

In my view the essential English innovation consists in the victory of the Celtic-motivated verbal noun construction (suffix -ung/-ing) over the Anglo-Saxon present participle construction (suffix -inde/-ande), where even the frequent use of the latter may have been provoked by attempts to integrate the Celtic aspect into English. (Vennemann 2001: 355)

Even though the frequency of use of the Expanded Form with the present parti-ciple in Old English may have been a consequence of the Celtic language shifters looking for an equivalent of their own progressive forms, the origin of the form itself should not be sought in Celtic, for the reason given further above and for yet another reason: Insular Celtic does not possess a present participle.

Though more frequent in Old English than in the other Germanic languages, even the Expanded Form with the present participle, as a forerunner of the Middle English Expanded Form with the verbal noun, does not appear to have been gram-maticalised, as Nickel writes in his book on this topic: “Within the Old English verbal system the E[xpanded] F[orm] is a locution still in process of development.” (Nickel 1966: 391).

Whereas I consider a Celtic origin of the English Expanded Form with the verbal noun ascertained,22 the source of the Celtic construction itself is not so

. The origin of the English progressive in the contact with Celtic is one of the earliest and certainly the most frequently cited example of this line of research. Cf. most recently Ahlqvist 2010: 58–63; Trudgill 2010: 28f.


Theo Vennemann

clear. It may have been a substratal feature because at least Old Egyptian has simi-lar constructions (cf. Vennemann 2001: 355).

Ad 6. The cleft constructionClefting barely begins in Old English, only gaining momentum in Middle English and further down to the present language. Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto (2008: 83) attribute this development to Celtic influence. Clefting is also very common in Egyptian (Coptic, see Reintges 2003) and common enough in Semitic languages for Huehnergard and Pat-El (2007: 338) to tentatively attribute it to Proto-Semitic.

Ad 7. Relative clause structureContact clauses, i.e. relative clauses without a relative pronoun, and related phe-nomena such as preposition stranding, though occasionally occurring in Old Eng-lish, become a regular feature of the language much later. Even if this development was subject to Celtic influence (which is debated, cf. Filppula, Klemola & Paulasto 2008: 90–94), it therefore remains outside the scope of this paper. Certain similari-ties between Semitic and Celtic relative clause constructions need not therefore be discussed either.

Ad 8. Other grammatical features with possible Celtic originThe phenomena discussed in this section do not fall under the heading of verbal categories.

. Conclusion

In this paper I looked at a number of verbal categories of Old English and Old High German with an eye to the role of language contact in their development.

In the first section, the remarkable fact that the Proto-Indo-European system of TAM categories was reduced to half its size in Germanic was discussed within the theory of prehistoric language contacts between pre-Germanic and Phoeni-cian (Punic, Carthaginian). Tabulating the categories of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, and Phoenician according to Mailhammer’s explanatory pro-posal of 2006, shows the Phoenician system acting like a filter in the transmission of the Proto-Indo-European categories to Proto-Germanic: Only those categories that were apprehended by the Phoenician language shifters on the basis of their own native language were learned by them; since this language variety was spo-ken by the former Phoenician superstrate speakers and thus possessed prestige, it became the basis of the developing Proto-Germanic language.



In the second section, I briefly mentioned those categories that were inno-vated in both languages by using nominal/adjectival parts of verbal paradigms as predicates with copulas or quasi-copular verbs, fully grammaticalising into the future and the perfect as well as the passive voice only in the later periods.

In the third section, I looked at a selection of verbal category features that were innovated in Old English, thus differentiating this language from Old High German, namely only those verbal category features for which a language-contact explanation has been offered. Of those only a single one had been grammaticalised before the beginning of the Old English period, the double copular paradigm, the only such feature for which an origin on the Continent and in Vasconic has been proposed. All other categorial features, all of them with an origin in the Isles and traceable to a Semitic source, only fully grammaticalised in Middle or Modern English, although they probably were involved in processes of grammaticalisation already in Old English.

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On gain and loss of verbal categories in language contact: Old English vs. Old High German

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