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

8. The PR -ĕre verbs with -ui perfects; those in -uĕre. I would like to
take first the -uĕre verbs, because they seem to have set a pattern for others
to follow. These verbs are battuere, fut(t)uere, consuere and conspuere,
which in Latin had perf. -ui, p.p. -ūtus. Now, the Romance forms go back
to *battere, *fut(t)ere (this includes Eng. fuoter beside a variant futtir,
which is paralleled by a similar futtire in Sardinian, perhaps coming from a
crossing of effutuo with effutio ‘blurt out’), *cosere, and even, in some
cases, *cosīre, and to the -īre forms *cospīre/*escopīre, for conspuere,
including a Fr. écopir, not usually noted. (Rum. scu(i)pi changed later to
scuipa.) In this case we may well wonder whether the u also disappeared
from the perfect; some -ūtus p.ps. survived (including OSp., OPtg. batudo,
fududo; note also Ptg. coseito, as cozeito, ‘cooked’), but seem to have been
rivalled by -ĭtus, as Sard. battitu (Rohlfs, §626) and the It. noun battito
(note a late Latin fut.p. battiturus, formed as ruiturus). Only Rumanian has
-ui perfects, bătui, futui, cusui, while elsewhere these verbs have all
changed to the weak -edi type. In French and Spanish the -edi perfect is
now identical with the -īvi perfect (and in Spanish bater has been replaced
by batir), but that they were originally distinct is shown by the battederit of
the Lex Sal. and OFr. abatiet, cousierent, and OSp. forms like meteo. In the
case of consuere the weak perfects follow the infinitive type, which is in
Italian cucire beside dial. cucere, cosere; cf. Prov. coser/cosir, Cat.
cosir/Rous. cuser, Sp. coser/cusir, Gal. coser/cusir, Sard. kosíre, Dalm.
koser with -er < -īre (OGasc. has perf. cozo, p.p. cosut). Given all these
weak perfects, we may well question whether this does not represent a PR
development, in which case the Rum. -ui perfects are new formations based
on the p.ps. In fact, on the basis of battederit, it is generally supposed that
there was a PR conjugation *battere, *battedi, battūtus (and *battĭtus ?),
which then set the pattern for vendere, vendedi, vendĭtus/*vendūtus. It may
also, as we shall see, have set the pattern for the replacement of -ui by -edi
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