The Germanic Weak Preterite Paul Kiparsky Stanford University 1 Introduction The dental preterite of weak verbs remains one of the most troublesome chapters of Germanic historical-comparative grammar. The morphological provenience of its dental formative -d- has been debated for nearly two centuries, and there is still no consensus on whether it is a reflex of one or more of the Indo-European dental suffixes, a grammaticalized form of the light verb d¯ o ‘do’, or some mix of these. The category’s phonological development within early Germanic presents a whole series of other mysteries. Why does the effect of syllable weight on umlaut in preterite stems differ in North and West Germanic, and for that matter why should umlaut be sensitive to syllable weight at all? Why does the dental preterite seem to undergo two distinct “phases” of umlaut in North Germanic, and why does this category alone undergo a special early phase of syncope in West Germanic? Lahiri 2000 was the first to connect the morphological puzzle of the weak preterite’s etymology with some of the main phonological puzzles of its divergent evolution within Germanic. She proposed that the form’s periphrastic origin can actually explain its phonological peculiarities. The purpose of this paper is to pro- pose a different way to make this link, which starts from the same morphological hypothesis, but supplies a much simpler account of the phonological development within the Germanic languages. The idea that the dental preterite ending is descended from the past tense of the light verb d¯ on ‘do’ goes back at least to Bopp 1816. Though not uncontroversial, it is perhaps the most widely accepted etymology of the dental preterite (Streit- berg 1896, Sverdrup 1929, von Friesen 1925, Tops 1974, Bammesberger 1986). From a morphological point of view, the assumption is certainly attractive. The templatic ablaut morphology by which “strong” verbs formed their past tenses, inherited from the Indo-European perfect, was restricted to monosyllabic roots. Longer verbs in Germanic would accordingly have formed their perfects with an 1