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

doing provides a valuable treasure-house of material. At first, in my
reading of him, he takes a moderate standpoint, only claiming this
pattern for a certain number of verbs for which the evidence is quite
strong, but as he advances in his work he seems to get more and more
carried away by his idea, until finally he is accusing all the arrhizotonic
forms of the strong verbs in the Romance languages which show a special
perfect stem of having been re-formed on the rhizotonic forms, which
seems to me a plain case of twisting the facts to suit a theory. However,
in spite of this, there does seem to me to be enough in his theory to
warrant a closer examination.
Such an examination requires a comparative study of the forms as
they appear in the various Romance languages, and the quoting of
innumerable examples. For the sake of conserving space I hope I may
be forgiven if I do not give references for the forms quoted; these
forms will, in many cases, be found fully documented by Dardel or
Wahlgren, or else are the common property of the standard manuals, as
listed at the end of Part III of this paper. Where I have supplied a
reference, it will be because the source may not readily be found, and
even here I will content myself with only the briefest of references,
using abbreviations to direct the reader to the Bibliography. In
principle I will give the earliest forms found in a language, but if I
inadvertently quote a modern form — because it serves my purpose just
as well — I crave the reader’s indulgence.
We obviously need to start at the beginning and see what basis
there is in Latin for such a theory, that is, we need to see if there is any
evidence that the varying perfect forms found at the different stages of
Latin were ever differentiated along the lines suggested by Dardel. In so
doing it will be simplest to divide the verbs up into different classes
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