zompist bboard

As the title says. Barely worth making a thread about, but they don't really fit anywhere else.

First, and more substantially: what are 'verba pura'? I've come across the term with reference to a small number of verbs in the north germanic languages, but I can't seem to find anything explaining why they're special exactly - uses of the term seem to assume that you either know what they are already, or else speak German or Swedish or Icelandic...


Second, and this is probably trivial, but... why is the Irish for 'tomato' "tráta"? Is that really just a really, really bad attempt to say "tomato"? [to-MAT-o > tmáto > tmáta > tráta ?] Or is there some other origin?

I'm guessing, based on the usage with reference to Proto-Germanic verbs, that verba pura in Germanic are verbs whose stems end in a vowel.

Salmoneus wrote:Second, and this is probably trivial, but... why is the Irish for 'tomato' "tráta"? Is that really just a really, really bad attempt to say "tomato"? [to-MAT-o > tmáto > tmáta > tráta ?] Or is there some other origin?

It's a good question. Normally if a borrowing undergoes that kind of transformation in Irish, you expect two things: (a) it's been around a while and (b) other variants exist.

For instance, take Connacht gasúr from Old French garçun. In Munster, you still find garsún. Or, to take a more relevant example, "potato" appears variously as práta, préata, preáta, or fata. But tráta is the only form I've found and only in very recent sources. (Dinneen's apparently lacks an entry for it and David Webb found no occurrences in his PUL corpus.) I thought I might find some archaic variants based on úll "apple", but no joy. Scottish-Gaelic uses tomàto or the colloquial gnoigean.

So my best guess is that it was coined on analogy with práta, but I'd love to find out more.

Right, thanks. And práta is in turn a deformation of 'potato'?

Salmoneus wrote:Right, thanks. And práta is in turn a deformation of 'potato'?

Presumably. Cf. Scottish Gaelic buntàta.

I think KathTheDragon is correct about the term verba pura.

Originally, the term seems to have been used in reference to Greek verb with a vowel before the ending (including before a thematic vowel), which frequently contract. See for example:
https://books.google.se/books?id=viYtAA ... &q&f=false

Rasmus Rask, in his 19th century Icelandic grammar (English translation below), uses the term in reference to Greek, but states that Icelandic verbs that are monosyllabic in the present indicative (singular) correspond to Greek verba impura, while verbs that are polysyllabic correspond to Greek verba pura:
https://books.google.se/books?id=EQXY5p ... &q&f=false

The term also seems to be used to refer to Germanic verbs with a root ending in a vowel, such as PG *sēaną ‘to sow’ (with a vowel before the ending). In the individual Germanic languages, this may be a slightly larger class than in PG itself due to consonant loss:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... 869FF5867A (English)
https://books.google.se/books?id=l8qeO7TofI4C&pg=PA144 (German)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40848869?s ... b_contents (German)
https://www.sprakochfolkminnen.se/downl ... _c_h43.pdf (Swedish, see p. 26)

And apparently, Rehehusen used the term in his 17th century Latvian grammar, for verbs where the infinitive -t was preceded by a vowel:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 ... src=recsys