Going Crazy? I Went There

The past few weeks have not been ideal for a novice blogger, but the next best thing to not being able to write for several weeks is, well, writing. Since my February was rife with illness, now would probably be the best time to analyze a certain “out-of-nowhere” word form that has bothered me for years.

Anyone who has studied English has noticed that certain words do not logically follow from their stem. Now, I am not talking about words like take that have ablauted forms in the perfect, took, or words that have irregular plurals like ox (oxen), but the words that make you pound your head against the wall when learning a new language. As a scholar of ancient Greek, one word comes to mind before all others: ‘οράω (horáō). As a native speaker of English, I think of go.

Go maintains the same root (go-)  in the present, future, imperfect, present perfect, future perfect, and pluperfect, wherein gone is formed by the root go- plus the preterit marker –en or (much less likely) it is of an unrelated root of similar meaning. In the simple perfect, English has the wall-head-bang-inducing form went. Went descends from the Germanic root *wind- through its causative form *wend-, which means “to cause to wind, to cause to become wound.” During the time Middle English was spoken, wend became synonymous with go in southern England (the northern regions used –ed suffixation). If you have trouble making the logical leap, think about winding your way through the forest or up a mountainside. The administrative English of London won out and replaced the suffixed form with its wend, which leave us modern speakers confused and enraged with wend’s progeny, went. This process of conflation happens regularly and often ends with pejoration or amelioration, but occasionally the terms are too intertwined and briefly occupy the same semantic locus until one wins out.

Went in the conjugation of go in the simple perfect just shows a vestige of the rich history of wend. The above ancient Greek conjugation illustrates conflation much earlier in the process than our knowledge of go can. The words ‘οράω, *όπω and εἶδω/ ίδεω occupy the same space in pre-Homeric Greek, both meaning “to see, to look (at), to perceive.” By the time Attic became the standard dialect, ‘οράω, *όπω and ίδεω have intertwining roots in their conjugation and only minimal connotative differences; ‘οράω indicates physical sight, *όπω shares the root of “optics” and has to do with physical sight exclusively, and ίδεω indicates physical and mental sight (i.e., understanding). In the perfect tenses, ίδεω exclusively means “to know.”

Greek has six “principle parts” from which all inflected forms are derived.

‘Οράω in Attic with the most common forms bolded:

Present	Future	Fut. Pass.	1st Aorist	2nd Aorist	Perf. Act.	Perf. Pas.
‘οράω					εώρακα	εώραμαι
*όπω	όψομαι	ωφθήσομαι	ώφθην		όπωπα	ώμμαι
εἶδω/ ίδεω				έιδον	οίδα	οίδαμαι

¹Latin tense names will be used for all tenses except for the perfect, which is separated into simple perfect and present perfect.

Sources: OED, thanks again to the University of Pittsburgh

              Wikipedia, well its source page…

              The Middle Liddel & Scott Greek-English Lexicon

              The Perseus Project