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 grammatical aspect, aspect, using multiple grammatical moods and grammatical voice, voices, and be ...

, named after the Indo-Iranianist Johanna Narten who posited its existence in 1968. It is characterized by accent on the

root In vascular plants, the roots are the plant organ, 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 bel ...

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 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 ) 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 relate ...

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,

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 and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

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 any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

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 Middle or The Middle may refer to: * Centre (geometry), the point equally distant from the outer limits. Places * Middle (sheading), a subdivision of the Isle of Man * Middle Bay (disambiguation) * Middle Brook (disambiguation) * Middle Creek ...

. 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 doing (something)" o ...

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 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 followed i ...

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 to 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 langu ...

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