Narten present is a proposed inflectional class of the

Proto-Indo-European verb Proto-Indo-European verbs reflect a complex system of morphology, more complicated than the substantive, with verbs categorized according to their aspect, using multiple grammatical moods and voices, and being conjugated according to person, n ...

, named after the Indo-Iranianist

Johanna Narten Johanna Narten (Hannover, 5 October 1930 – Uttenreuth, 15 July 2019), was a German Indo-Europeanist and Indo-Iranian linguist who discovered the reconstructed morphological category in Proto-Indo-European now known as the Narten present. She ...

who posited its existence in 1968. It is characterized by accent on the

root In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the su ...

in all of the person-number forms. Roots having Narten presents always possess a surface accent, having a lengthened grade R(ḗ) in the singular active, and a full-grade R(é) in the rest of the active forms, as well as the mediopassive. The proposed examples of roots having such ''acrostatic presents'' include the following: These forms are best reflected in Indo-Iranian and Hittite, with relics surviving in other languages, particularly in the root "to eat".

Narten roots

In 1994

Jochem Schindler Jochem "Joki" Schindler (8 November 1944 in Amstetten, Lower Austria – 24 December 1994 in Prague) was an Austrian Indo-Europeanist. In spite of his comparatively thin bibliography, he made important contributions, in particular to the theory of ...

suggested the existence of what is called ''Narten roots'' – roots exhibiting a systematic *R(ḗ) ~ *R(é)

ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...

in both nominal and verbal derivations, as opposed to the more common R(e) ~ R(Ø) pattern. These roots always carried a surface accent, and such ablaut is called more generally ''Narten ablaut''. The other roots would then be ''non-Narten roots'', exhibiting the R(e) ~ R(Ø) ablaut and allowing the accent to move away from the root. It has been shown that verbal roots exhibiting Narten ablaut occur in the same morphophonological environments as the roots with mobile accentuation and, furthermore, that nominal stems exhibiting acrostatic Narten ablaut *R(ḗ) ~ *R(é) occur in the same morphophonological environments as roots undergoing the more usual R(ó) ~ R(é) type. This insight has led to the development of modern theories regarding the relation of

PIE accent Proto-Indo-European accent refers to the accentual (stress) system of the Proto-Indo-European language. Description Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is usually reconstructed as having had variable lexical stress: the placement of the stress in a word ...

and the resulting ablaut classes: all roots, suffixes and inflectional endings (

desinence In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry gr ...

s) can be inherently "accented" or not, and the surfacing stress (i.e. the accent of the PIE word) falls on only one syllable, depending on the interplay of underlying accentuation of the combining

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

Internal reconstruction

Narten-type ablaut with a lengthened-grade singular and a full grade elsewhere is speculated to have been the original form of the Proto-Indo-European s-aorist, which had the root in the lengthened e-grade in Indo-Iranian, Italic and Slavic, but in the full-grade in Greek and the Indo-Iranian middle. Proto-Indo-European long-vowel preterites with */ē/ in the root are according to some originally

imperfect The imperfect ( abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to ...

s of Narten presents, which explains the lengthened grade.

Acceptance and criticism

The existence of Narten roots has been disputed in recent years. According to the lengthened grade stem in the singular was formed complementary to root aorist, replacing the secondary endings by primary endings and changing the ablaut vowel. analyzes the evidence collected by Schindler and Narten on acrostatic inflection in Avestan and PIE and concludes that "the concept of 'Narten' roots can be abandoned altogether.". On the other hand,

Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben The ''Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben'' (''LIV'', ''"Lexicon of the Indo-European Verbs"'') is an etymological dictionary of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) verb. The first edition appeared in 1998, edited by Helmut Rix. A second edition foll ...

classifies Narten roots under the type ''(1b) "acrodynamic present"'', reconstructing in total 52

PIE root The roots of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) are basic parts of words that carry a lexical meaning, so-called morphemes. PIE roots usually have verbal meaning like "to eat" or "to run". Roots never occurred alone in the lan ...

s belonging to this inflectional class, of which 32 are marked as "certain" and 20 as "uncertain".

Notes

References

* * * * * * * {{Proto-Indo-European language Proto-Indo-European language