Frederik Kortlandt – Leiden University – www.kortlandt.nl THE PROTO-GERMANIC PLUPERFECT

The Germanic perfect presents (Präteritopräsentien) form a past tense by add-ing the endings of the weak preterit to the stem of the past participle, e.g. Go. wissa ‘knew’. This is a recent formation (cf. Kortlandt 1989). We may therefore ask ourselves if we can reconstruct the earlier formation which was ousted by the weak preterit. We may also try to recover the motivation for the replace-ment. There was no pluperfect in Proto-Indo-European. In Greek we find a de-rivative stem (w)eidē- ‘knew’, seemingly with the same suffix as in Slavic vědě-. If such a formation had existed in Germanic, it would hardly have been re-placed by *wissē-, cf. Go. witaida ‘observed’, which corresponds to Latin vidē-.1 The Vedic pluperfect can be defined as a perfect stem with secondary (ao-rist, imperfect) endings, e.g. ávedam ‘I knew’(cf. especially Thieme 1929). This formation, which is occasionally found in Greek, may also have existed in Ger-manic. Indeed, I think that the hypothesis of a former pluperfect with secondary endings offers an explanation for a number of unclear points in Germanic his