John McWhorter writes of a notion that Germanic strong verbs, verbs that represent tense with an ablaut series, derive from interaction with some unnamed Semitic language.

He is a contrarian, ain't he? And where did the un-named Semitic language borrow it from? Germanic ablaut looks a lot like Indo-European ablaut in general, a lot of which happens through the language family. Where did Latin borrow it from? (cf. capio, cepi)?

But seriously, I think that the ablaut was phonological at first, and only later came to be re-analyzed as morphological (i.e., having to do with tense). It's the sort of thing that happens often enough cross-linguistically that it has a name: grammaticalization.

Last edited by zmjezhd; 09/27/2011 1:04 PM.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.