Beating, Hacking, and Spitting: Germanic Contributions to the Question of Acrostatic d-Presents in Proto-Indo-European

Abstract

Abstract There are a number of Germanic Class VII strong verbs that display rootvowel -a- in the present tense in conjunction with stem-final -t, most of which also share common semantic ranges denoting either motion or vigorous or violent activity. It has been suggested that this shared set of distinctive characteristics may be the traces of a discrete group of verbal d-presents that constituted a sub-class of acrostatic o/e-presents in Proto-Indo-European. In this paper I scrutinize these verbs and their Indo-European cognates against the light of this hypothesis. I conclude that there is adequate evidence from Germanic to infer the existence of such a verbal class, but further investigation in the other branches of Indo-European is needed.