Oudfries pligia: een aanzet tot een habitual past tense in het Fries?

Abstract

The class II weak verbs in Frisian are characterized by the absence of a
dental suffix in the past tense. In the Old-Frisian, obviously written, sources
this is still not the common form, but from the 15th century onwards we find
in charters and in other late Old-Frisian sources the first, still rare attestations
of d-deletion in these verbs, probably indicating a more frequent
occurrence in the spoken language. Only in one verb this development is
already universally applied: pligia, in the sense of ‘used to ..’. Besides the
fact that the past tense is only attested in forms such as pliga, something else
is happening: present tense forms such as pligit not seldomly refer to a
situation in the past. We see here a blurring of the boundaries between
present and past tense, a feature which can be explained by the meaning of
the verb, but probably also attests a first step in the grammaticalization
process, certainly when other factors are taken into consideration (the
morphology, but also the absence of infinite forms).
We see here a clear parallel with the etymological equivalent of pligia in
modern Yiddish: fleg(n) ‘used to ...’. There are differences: modern Yiddish
shares with the Southern German dialects from which it is derived the
absence of preterite forms. In addition, the Yiddish verb has a high text frequency.
However, it shares with pligia a weak lexical content and the almost
complete lack of infinite forms. In certain respects the development towards
grammaticalization has been carried out further in this case: while pligia is
still linked to the following infinitive by to, the Yiddish equivalent shows a
direct connection with the infinitive, without a preposition. In addition, in
the present indicative 3rd sing. the ending -t is lacking, which is also a
feature of auxiliary verbs, mostly praeterito-praesentia. The special situation
in Yiddish has caused some reference grammars to include a separate
category in their discussion of verbs: the habitual past tense. In this study
the Old-Frisian attestations are analysed. There is a beginning of grammaticalization,
but different from the Yiddish (and in a sense from the English semantically cognate
verb used to ...) this was not carried through in modern Frisian. A factor to
take into consideration is that the verb pligia,
characteristic of formal written language, did offer less possibilities for use
in the post-medieval period, during which Frisian lost its position as the
official language.