The Old Khotanese Metanalysis

Abstract

A range of present stems in Khotanese which historically ended in a consonant behave synchronically as vowel final stems. Forms like bvāre ‘they know’ or bvāne ‘may I know’ imply a synchronic stem bu-, but most scholars have preferred a shape bud- because the Proto-Iranian antecedent is *baud-. A metanalysis resolves the apparent contradiction between diachrony and synchrony. Sometime in pre-Khotanese there was a morphophonological reanalysis wherein some consonant final verb stems were reinterpreted as being vowel final, and a series of suffixes historically beginning with single *-t- were reinterpreted as beginning with double /tt/. A word like 3Sp.m butte ‘he knows’ was originally analyzed as *bud- + -te and later reanalyzed as bu- + -tte /βuttē/. The vowel stems resulting from the metanalysis behave no differently from other vowel stems. All forms arising from the addition of vowel initial suffixes show contractions which are either attested elsewhere in the grammar or are phonologically natural. They show no trace of a final consonant on the synchronic level. Properly identifying the synchronic forms of the affected stems and suffixes enables a more regular and systematic description of the attested forms. It permits a reduction from Emmerick’s four present stem types, A, B, C, D, to just two, A and B.