Old English Cyme and the Proto‐Indo‐European Aorist Optative in Germanic

Abstract

Although it has long been known that the Germanic subjunctive continues the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) optative, and several Germanic strong presents appear to continue reinterpreted PIE aorist subjunctives, the fate of PIE aorist optatives as a morphological category in Germanic has never been explicitly considered. Taking as a starting point Old English cuman 'come' and its cognates, the author argues that if the present indicative goes back to the PIE aorist subjunctive *g w em-e / o -of the root *g w em-(cf. Vedic g amat(i), G ah a Avestan jamait ı), this at once explains why the OE present subjunctive cyme with its synchronically irregular i-umlaut continues the PIE aorist optative of the same root, attested e.g. in Avestan jamii at̰ . The root vowel of cuman is the result of either language-specific sound changes as in Old Norse koma and later Old High German coman or, more probably, backformation to cyme; the latter has apparently also taken place in Old Frisian kuma~koma, Old Saxon kuman and so may be dated to the period before the breakup of the Ingvaeonic dialect continuum. The remainder of the paper discusses other potential reflexes of PIE root aorist optatives in Germanic, and offers an explanation for their disappearance.