Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-2dmjx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T14:51:03.029Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Indo-European Middle Ending -r

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Edith Frances Claflin
Edith Frances Claflin*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

[If we accept the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, the existence of middle r-paradigms in both Hittite and Indo-European puts the middle ending -r back into Indo-Hittite. Even if we assume that Hittite is simply one of the IE dialects, the evidence for medial r-forms in PIE is still overwhelmingly strong. The semantic aspect is important. There is virtually no positive evidence for a volitive impersonal in -r. But verbal r-forms with middle meaning occur in Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Hittite, Armenian, Phrygian, Venetic, Italic, and Celtic. This proves that not only r-forms, but r-forms with middle meaning, were inherited.]

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 14 , Issue 1-Part1: January-March , March 1938 , pp. 1 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © 1938 by the Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 BSL 32.1-28.

2 AJP 48.157-75; Lang. 5.232-50.

3 KZ 30.224-89.

4 AJP 53.209 (footnote 36).

5 A.W.M. Odé, De uitgangen met R van het deponens en het passivum in de indoeuropeesche talen 37 (Haarlem, 1924).

6 Lang. 5.232-50.

7 KZ 30.224-89 passim; see especially 229-30, 231-2, 237, 257-8, 282-3, and Zimmer's own summary, 287.

8 L.c. 283.

9 L.c. 261-2; 283.

10 Cf. E. F. Claflin, Lang. 5.237, 238, footnotes 33 and 35.

11 Cf. Petersen, Lang. 12.172.

12 L.c. 230, 240, 257, 267, 268, 281-3.

13 L.c. 229.

14 Cf. my paper on The Nature of the Latin passive, AJP 48.157-60.

15 Id. ibid. 169-70.

16 Vorlesungen über Syntax2, Erste Reihe, 130-37 (Basel 1926).

17 Vergleichende Syntax der Schulsprachen3 46-9 (Leipzig und Berlin 1931).

18 Cf. Lang. 5.240, with footnotes 49 and 50.

19 Cf. Lang. 5.243-4.

20 Cf. Lang. 5.246-7.

21 Cf. Lang. 5.247-8.

22 KZ 37.106.

23 Lang. 5.245-6.

24 Cf. Thurneysen's remark (KZ 37.103): Vielmehr kann man nur sagen, dass es im Keltischen und Italischen sonderbare r-formen giebt, etc.

25 For a convenient review of the evidence, see Odé, 3-31.

26 See Meillet, Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue latine2 27 (Paris 1931); Marstrander, Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 3.243 (Oslo 1929); Pokorny, Die Stellung des Tocharischen im Kreise der indogermanischen Sprachen, Berichte des Forschungs-Institutes für Osten und Orient 3.47-50 (Vienna 1923); Charpentier, Die verbalen r-Endungen der indogermanischen Sprachen 6 and 113-18 (Uppsala, Leipzig, 1917).

27 Cf. Sommer 47-8.

28 Reference in ftn. 26.

29 BG 4.10.

30 Cf. Meillet, Esquisse d'une grammaire comparée de l'arménien classique 93 (Vienna 1903).

31 W. M. Calder, Journal of Hellenic Studies 31.209 (1911), cf. also 187; Leumann-Stolz, Lat. Gram. 307.

32 See Lang. 12.23-34.

33 See my paper, l.c., 29.

34 Lang. 12.132.

35 Norsk Tidsskrift 3.249.

36 Lang. 12.172.

37 On OIr canar cf. Lang. 12.30-1.

38 A. Meillet, Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes7 235 (Paris 1934).

39 See Buck, Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian 279.

40 Read in Washington at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the LSA, Jan. 1, 1931.

41 On the use of the reflexive in Romance in the sense of both passive voice and indeterminate subject, cf. C. Barrett Brown, Lang. 12.42.

42 KZ 37.104-6.

43 Cf. my criticism of this reasoning, Lang. 5.246.

44 Grundriss2 2.3.658-9.

45 AJP 53.209.

46 Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Language 262.

47 Cf. Sturtevant 31, 91.

48 Archiv für lateinische Lexikographie und Grammatik 10.1-10.

49 It is a striking fact, to which too little attention has been paid by ‘impersonal’ theorizers, that the Old Irish passive has a subject in the third person, as in berir breth foir ‘judgment is passed upon him’, Wb. 12d 38. It is in Modern Irish that the use of the passive with a subject is entirely given up and the r-form conceived as a ‘man‘-form, governing the accusative of all pronouns. Cf. Pedersen, Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen 2.394-5; Walde, Über älteste sprachliche Beziehungen zwischen Kelten und Italikern 22. We can thus see the development of the impersonal use in historical times. Zimmer was so impressed with the difficulty of explaining this usage on his own theory of the impersonal as the earlier force of the form that he actually suggested (KZ 30. 255-6) that the use of the nominative with OIr. doberr, doberar might be an imitation of the Latin construction with dicitur, dicatur, due to the influence of Irish scholars. This hypothesis is certainly more ingenious than convincing.