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

sight difficult to fit Sp. asir(se) in here because of its single s, though one
could easily imagine the semantic transition from ‘besiege’ (It. assidersi) to
‘seize’. However, Pellegrini (Sp., 147:5) quotes old subj. forms assa, assas,
so it may be possible that there was an old *assir < assīdĕre which was
changed to asir through contamination with asa ‘handle’; this would also
account for its being a primary verb and not changing to *asecer. (We
might even hazard that asgo, asga started out as *assio, *assia, which then
followed the process that turned *tenyo, *tenya into tengo, tenga; cf. the
consonant combination in plazgo, plazga, yazgo, yazga.) I am not happy
with Malkiel’s suggested derivation from *ansire, based on ansa ‘handle’,
as I would then expect it to have the meaning ‘equip with handles’; the
excuse put forward in support of this derivation is that a formation such as
*ansare would have been liable to confusion with the verb for ‘roast’, but
in old Spanish the latter was spelt assar, cf. assadas, L.B.A. 1385c; note
that Portuguese has asado ‘having handles or ears’, kept distinct from
assado ‘roasted’. In French it will be noticed that -s- forms, as sesis, are
also found analogically in vesimes, enchesest (based on similar forms in
other verbs which are found with and without -s-, cf. §§21, 28, 30, 31), and
that all four verbs also have p.ps. in -eit, usually in the East and North-East.
These p.ps. Fouché (§193) explains on the analogy of bene(d)ir, bene(d)eit,
based on the similarity between beneïr and the infinitives chaïr/cheïr, seïr,
veïr. Cf. also Prov. cazech. To explain the adoption of sis in French, one
needs to remember that an -ui perfect and -ūtu p.p. for this verb would have
been too much subject to confusion with the perfects and p.ps. of savoir
and suivre. This seems to me one more argument in favour of supposing
that French originally did agree with the other languages in having such
forms, besides the fact that sessus was not a p.p. and only survived in PR as
a noun.
When we look at Provençal and Catalan we find a situation
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