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

fact that these replaced strong rhizotonic forms at an early date, plus the
occurrence of strong arrhizotonic ploguiere, yoguiere, would seem rather to
point to a trend in Spanish to replace strong perfects by weak ones. But
once again, there may have been old arrhizotonic forms without u which
provided the impetus for this change; we just cannot be sure.
The Sp. -ler verbs show only weak forms, with p.p. doludo, and cf.
(es)moludo, and parere is represented by parecer, to be discussed later
(§13), so the only remaining verbs in this group are tener and venir. In the
latter case the dialects show that the original paradigm was vine, veniste,
veno, veniemos, veniestes, venieron, from Lat. vēni, with the vin- produced
by metaphony early extended in OCast.; there is an old p.p. venudo (Fer.
Gonz.) from PR *venūtus, seen in the name Venutus, but no trace of *vēnui.
For tener the OCast. perfect forms are tove, toviste, tovo etc., p.p. tenudo,
but the other dialects show forms based on tev- or tiv-, such as tevi, tevo,
tivo, teveron, tevier, and even tudiere, as pudiere (M.-P.), and also weak
tovió, p.p. tovido/tuvido. The loss of n in tov-, tev-, tiv- points to analogical
re-forming of this strong perfect on other perfects like ove, sovo/sevo/sivo.
Once again, OArag. produces examples of forms without u, such as
tenieron, teniés (S. Juan de la Peña; the teniesse that Dardel quotes from
Berceo, Mil., 720a (p. 46), is an imperfect reflexive form), and MArag. has
the weak perfect tenié (and so also venié), while the Fuero Juzgo gives
tinió, which once again obscures the question of the antiquity of such forms.
Given the general Spanish tendency to form weak perfects for all verbs, we
cannot say that the evidence of Spanish alone enables us to reach any firm
conclusion about Romance in general, especially when we find that this
class of verbs is more conservative in Portuguese. All we can say is that in
Spanish itself there may have been an early stratum of the monerim,
moneris type of Latin, which led to forms like auiesses, sabiesse, and
encouraged the widespread change to weak perfects which will become
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