To Be or to Be: Aspects of Existence (Act III)

Here is the present-tense paradigm of ‘to be’ in five Germanic languages. The figure below is a cladogram showing how those languages are related to one another.

	Gothic	Old Norse	OHG	Old Frisian	Old English
1sg.	im	em	bim	bem	eom	bēo
2sg.	is	ert	bist	bist	eart	bist
3sg.	ist	er	ist	is	is	biþ
1pl.	sijum	erum	birum	send	sind	bēoþ
2pl.	sijuþ	eruð	birut
3pl.	sind	eru	sint

The Gothic and Old Norse forms are all derivable (albeit with some complications) from the inherited paradigm of PIE *h₁es-/*h₁s-. The Old Norse root is er- (rather than es-) probably because the Germanic forms of ‘to be’ for the most part reflect unstressed, enclitic variants of the verb. If Proto-Germanic *s was intervocalic and preceded by an unstressed vowel, it became *z by so-called Verner’s Law. In North and West Germanic languages this *z became /r/ (there was no such change in Gothic). The third-person forms er and  eru were innovative, created analogically to match the rest of the paradigm.

More curious is the occurrence of an initial /b/ in some of the West Germanic forms (see the blue-shaded cells in the table). In Old High German, we find verb forms which look like the expected reflexes of *h₁es-/*h₁s-, except that a /b/ is prefixed to the verb in the first and second persons, singular as well as plural. Old Frisian exhibits the same oddity, but only in the singular, because the Anglo-Frisian languages had given up distinguishing grammatical persons in the plural and generalised the 3pl. form. Note that there are no “b-forms” whatsoever in Gothic and Old Norse, so it looks as if the use of /b/ in the first and second persons were a distinctly West Germanic innovation.

And yet, most strangely of all, English does not follow the same pattern. This would be less surprising if English were a “basal” West Germanic language loosely related to the rest of the group. But no, English is nested rather deep inside one of the subgroupings of West Germanic. Still, even today, English has am, are (older art), is as opposed to Modern German bin, bist, ist. Instead of isolated appearances of an initial /b/, Old English had a full set of b-forms as an alternative present-tense paradigm beside the rather faithfully retained reflexes of *h₁es-/*h₁s-. In no way can the Old English pattern be explained as a local innovation. It must be an archaism: OE preserved two “alleles” of ‘to be’ for each person, whereas both its sister language, Old Frisian, and its slightly more distant cousin, Old High German, had eliminated one of the variants and fixed the other. The fact that in both languages the b-forms show a similar distribution is therefore the result of convergence, not a shared West Germanic feature. Also the total absence of b-forms in Gothic and Old Norse must be due to the parallel elimination of a pattern present already in Proto-Germanic. The strange root *bi-, which seems to underly the Old English b-forms, is unique to that language; Old Frisian and OHG have forms contaminated with it rather than its direct reflexes. Nevertheless, this contamination is indirect evidence of the presence of *bi- in Proto-West Germanic. Since outside Germanic PIE *bʰuH- has provided verb forms with the meaning of ‘to be’ in several branches (Slavic *byti, Lat. fuī ‘I was’, etc.), the archaic status of the alternative b-paradigm in Old English is quite clear. Note the importance of the outgroup data, overriding the negative evidence of Gothic and Old Norse. Apparently the insular isolation of English since the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain in the fifth century helped it to preserve a curious lexical relict.

If we were to reconstruct the early Germanic prototypes of the OE b-forms, they would have to look more or less like this:

1sg. *bi-ō, 2sg. *bi-si, 3sg. *bi-þi, 3pl. *bi-anþi

Such a reconstruction is hardly satisfactory, since the endings look partly like those of the thematic conjugation (1sg.), partly athematic (2-3sg.), and partly ambiguous (3pl.). The pattern must have been reworked in some way, but how? Let us note first that the root *bʰuH- occurs in Germanic outside of the paradigm of ‘to be’. One old imperfective stem derived from the root aorist, *bʰuH-jé/ó- yielded Germanic *bū-i/a- (OE būan, ON búa ‘dwell, inhabit’), but it doesn’t match the OE b-forms either formally or semantically. Secondly, although the residue of the b-conjugation was completely integrated with  the *h₁es-/*h₁s- pattern in continental West Germanic, Old English had two semi-independent sets of forms, preserving subtle semantic differences which may offer a clue to understanding the origin of *bi-.

But I suppose this is more than enough for one blog post. The investigation will be continued in the next.