Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/256

 250 Klaeber CONCERNING THE FUNCTIONS OF OLD ENGLISH "GEWEORDAN" AND THE ORIGIN OF GERMAN "GEWAHREN LASSEN" I. weorfian and geweorfian. In the oldest stage of Germanic the verb werpan, being per- fective in meaning, was incapable of adding to its stem the particle of perfectivation, ga, gi. In contrast with the Gothic, which has faithfully preserved this status, the Old English has gone very far in the analogical use of geweorfian, by the side of weorfian. A phrase like wearfi. . . onscege as used in Beow. 2482 f. is found expanded to onsage gewearlp in a charter of the end of the tenth century (Crawford Collection ed. Napier and Stevenson, 19.8). Growing uncertainty is reflected in the differ- ent treatment of the same form in two manuscripts of Gregory's Dialogues, 22.8, MS.H: weard (pas gingran eadmodnys pam abbode to lareowe), MS.C: gewearfi. Again, yElfric's normal wearfi in fta wear's seo menigu swifie ablicged, Horn. I 314.6 appears as iwar'd in the Early Middle English transcription in the Lambeth MS. (Morris, Old English Homilies I 89.31); in the same way wearfi, ^Elfr. Horn. I 318.1 (pa wearfi micel ege on Codes gelafiunge) is changed to iwear'S, Lambeth MS., ib. 93.7, weard, wurdon, ^Elfr. Horn. I 324. 11 f. to iwearfi, iweorden, Lambeth MS., ib. 97.36, 99.1. Even in Beowulf, gewearfi, in pa sio fahd gewearfi gewrecen wrafilice 3061 occurs in place of the proper weard. The invasion has practically become absolute conquest in the past participle, which nearly always appears in the form geworden. Indeed, the instances of warden are so rare as to arrest our attention. Gen. 1694, 2236, Dan. 124, Par. Ps. 21.5, 21.11, 117.14, Met. Boeth. 19.29, Rush. Luke 2.1, Lind. Mat. Pref. 18.18, Wulfst. 279.30 are the only places of its occur- rence recorded in dictionaries and glossaries. The loose, apparently unmeaning use of this ge- is well illus- trated by the fact that in poetry purely metrical reasons seem to