Caspar Jordan

The historical development of the (formerly) strong verbs in Gutnish

Caspar Jordan (Uppsala University)

I will talk about mixed paradigms of formerly so-called strong (i.e. ablauting) verbs in Gutnish. These are verbs that used to have an unequivocally strong theme with ablaut marking the various verb forms but now show a mixture of strong and weak forms in the theme. Variation between strong and weak forms seems to be or have been free. I will propose that the variation is not a direct sign of language endangerment but rather an identity marker against closely related contact languages.