Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/60

36 been taken, and many verbs originally reduplicating are treated as they are now, e.g. Go. bind, band = bind, bound; sit, sat. This is the result of a shifting of the accent due to the addition of personal endings, similar to what we see in photográph, photógraphy, cáput, capitís. Hence have arisen the monosyllabic preterites that we find in Go., Ger. and Eng. These processes exhausted themselves ages ago. Not a single strong verb has been developed within the historical period. The younger weak and derivative inflection supplies our increasing wants, and, like Jacob, appropriates the heritage of its elder brother. "We say helped, dragged, slipped, for example, for the Go. halp, drôg, slaup. A Scotsman even says begoud for began, and, still worse, seen for saw, hoten for hit, and putten for put. It was a Glasgow merchant, they say, who, visiting the Louvre, remarked in answer to his French conductor's "This is a portrait of Burke, your great countryman," "Dod, maan, I seen him hanged."

But the best proof of the value of Gothic as an aid to historical grammar is to be found in the analysis it renders possible of our weak preterites in -d and -ed. There we see that they are really compounds, like will go, am walking, &c. The auxiliary do has coalesced with the stem, so that I love is just I love-did. The Go. tam-jan, to tame, in its past, is declined on the model of love-did.

Strange to say, the very common Teut. verb to do is not found as a separate verb in Gothic. It must have reduplicated and formed its pret. as S. di-da, di-des, di-da: Pl. di-ded-um, and so on. The first syllable disappears when used as a compound tense. It thus appears that, even where apparently we see tense indicated in Eng. by modification of the stem, we really use an auxiliary. Gothic uses this composite tense as freely as we do now. At the grave of Lazarus "Jesus wept" (ἐδάκρυσεν), which Wulfila renders, "Jah tagrida Jesus," as if we were to