Talk:Nasal infix

Stand/stood

Is stand/stood a Germanic remnant of this? +Angr 14:12, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

According to Ringe (in "From PIE to PGmc"): "The PGmc present *standaną was apparently backformed to the past with the nasal infix (Seebold 1970: 461) and suffixal accent (whence its stem-final *-d-)." And also "*stand-i/a- ‘to stand’ is a unique nasal-infixed monster, apparently built to its own innovative past stem." LIV lists nasal-infixed present stem of *steh₂- (*st-né-h₂- ~ *st-n̥-h₂-) but doesn't list Germanic as a reflex. So it's not of direct PIE origin I guess.. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 02:27, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Could think/thought possibly be another example in English? Markcymru (talk) 22:14, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Tempting, but I don't think so. It's from PIE *teng- or *tenǵ-, so the nasal is part of the root. The Proto-Germanic past tense is *þanhtǭ per [1], the West-Germanic past is *þą̄htā per [2]; I don't know why the *n got lost. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk)

That the PIE root contains n isn't convincing, really, since it could just place the nasal infix further back in time. But the fact that the Proto-Germanic past contains n kind of seals it! Markcymru (talk) 19:56, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

n-initial suffixes

The article mentions the present tense suffixes *-neu- and *-neH-. These almost certainly originated as the e-grade of the nasal infix inserted into roots ending in w or H, e.g. root *k^wreiH- with infixed present stem *k^wri-ne-H- got reinterpreted as root *k^wrei- with suffixed present stem *k^wri-neH-. Old Irish and Old Church Slavonic also have nasal-initial present tense suffixes, but to the best of my knowledge no synchronic infixes like Latin and Sanskrit have. +Angr 22:37, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Correct for OCS: Slavic thematic conjugation is traditionally divided in 4 classes, one of which has *-ne/-na present stems (e.g. sta-ti "to stay" > 2nd p. sg. OCS sta-ne-ši), but this class derives from IE thematic presents in suffixes *-ne-/-no-, which was additionally mixed with originally athematic verbs in *-new-/-nu-. So none of PIE nasal-infix origin. Also, almost all of the verbs of this class are of perfective aspect. OCS has preserved original PIE nasal infix only in traces. OTOH, Lithuanian has preserved it very well.

The claim on the origin of those PIE p.t. suffixes is very interesting, and should be mentioned in the article if it can be sourced. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 02:53, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Choctaw

I'd like to add a section about the Choctaw language which also has a nasal infix ("n-grade") with durative meaning. Does anyone know how to source this? The WP article has no inline citations. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 16:45, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Present tense markers/aspect switchers

I'm going to propose an eventual goal of turning this page into a general one concerning all the present tense markers, and perhaps some of the root aspect markers as well. It's already well on its way, and I'd like to see it linked from the main Proto-Indo-European verb page. Dr. Elwin Ransom (talk) 03:35, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

A page discussing nasal infixes in various languages and the present tense markers of PIE seems a bit random to me. Perhaps we should have a separate page Proto-Indo-European tense markers or the like (with a link to this one of course)? --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 08:37, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Quite so -- actually this is more in line with what I was thinking. I forgot that the current page refers to non-Indo-European nasal infixes as well. I originally thought they were mentioned merely to illustrate that this reconstructed phenomenon in IE was a very real phenomenon in other languages, but now I see that it is a bit of a catch-all. Dr. Elwin Ransom (talk) 13:51, 14 September 2009 (UTC)