THE STRONG PERFECTS IN THE ROMANCE ... - Page ON

tin(g), tenis, tint, and vin(g), venis, vint etc. (ting, ving, like voil, with
palatalisation before a following vowel), with other forms like tensis,
vensis (this time to be referred to the action of prendre, which has prensis),
EFr. tenui, venust, NFr. tinve, vinve (with development as in the adj.
tenv(r)e from tenuis). The parallelism between the forms must mean that
tenui and vēni influenced each other, producing the pairs *tēnui/*tēni and
*vēnui/vēni (the long e’s being required to produce the i’s in French). As
we have seen, Latin has examples of forms with and without u for both
verbs, and vin(g), vinve, at least, can be traced directly back to them, so we
do not have the problem of speculating what happened to the u. Once again,
French keeps the paradigms with and without u separate. Here Dardel, in
quoting as usual the contrast between ting, “dont la voyelle a été influencée
par celle de 1 ving”, and tenis, does not explain whether he thinks ting
comes from *tēnni < tēnui, but evidently wishes to convey this impression;
if so, then I would counter that by the same token tenis should come from
*tēnnisti < tēnuisti. (For another parallel to EFr. tenui, venust see semonui
under the -si perfects below, §31, which may go back to Lat. submonui.)
Paroir gives parui, parus, paru(t) etc. and p.p. paru/pareü, and
courre follows the same conjugation. It will be seen that in French this
conjugation is typical of the stems ending in a liquid or nasal
(criembre/cremoir similarly has cremui, p.p. cremu), and from the point of
view of French alone it may be said that these weak perfects were formed
under the influence of the p.ps. (this would seem to be the natural
explanation of the regional developments voulu(s) (later to become the
standard), tenui, venust), aided by the weak forms like oüs, poüs and also,
perhaps, by fui, fus, fut (see below, §32). But when one looks at the -rere
verbs (parēre, currere, quaerere) in Provençal, Gascon and Catalan, one is
struck by the fact that they have developed special forms as Prov. parec,
correc, querec, with corresponding p.ps. paregut/parut, corregut, queregut
24