Haven't you always wondered why the imperfect active indicative of sum goes:
| eram | erāmus | |||
| erās | erātis | |||
| erat | erant | |||
Who hasn't? Well, the rhotacization of intervocalic /s/ is to blame. The stem used to be *es-1, which you can still see in the present active indicative es, est, estis. But the imperfect added -ā (with the usual endings -m, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt), which made the the /s/ fall between two vowels. You can see what happened next: the universal change of intervocalic /s/ to intervocalic /r/ in the 4th and 5th c. BCE left the imperfect active indicative we all know and love.
This discussion, btw, recaps footnote 13 from page 35 of Keller and Russell. As you can tell, I'm groovin' on this book.
Update: I suddenly realized that while I had been talking about rhotacization, I'd been talking about it on one of my other blogs,
logomacy So the title of this post was a non sequitur. Sorry about that.
1 * indicates a form that has been deduced, but not actually observed.
Posted by joshua at January 27, 2005 09:12 AMThat's cool - thanks for posting that! Keep it coming!
Posted by: Alan Phipps at January 27, 2005 02:10 PM