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The verbs derived from habere usually have an 'i' in the stem rather than an 'a'. For example, adhibere, exhibere, inhibere, and prohibere, leading to the modern English verbs adhibit, exhibit, inhibit, and prohibit.

Why did the stem vowel change when prefixes were added to habere to form new verbs?

This is mostly a matter of curiosity for me, since this seemingly arbitrary change, which nevertheless occurs in all of the verbs derived from habere by adding prefixes, except for antehabere and posthabere for some reason, makes the etymology of words like exhibition or inhibition more difficult to deduce (since there is no Latin word hibitio).

Chill2Macht
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1 Answers1

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It's usual to attribute it to a point in time when Latin had a strong stress accent on the first syllable, so interior vowels in open syllables weakened to i or (depending on the environment) u. So, we posit something like: *in+'habere -> *'inhabere -> 'inhibere -> inhi'bere.

(IPA: [ɪn+ˈhɑbeːrɛ] -> [ˈɪnhɑbeːrɛ] -> [ˈɪnhɪbeːrɛ] -> [ɪnhɪˈbeːrɛ])

(As a side remark, I think this phenomenon provides additional support for the accepted view that short i was lax vowel [ɪ] rather than a tense vowel [i].)

varro
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    So is that kind of like how someone might say "int'rest" instead of "in-ter-est", or "re-uh-bilitate" instead of "re-ha-bilitate"? – Chill2Macht Jun 20 '17 at 19:18
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    Yes, something quite similar happens in English where unaccented vowels get reduced to shwas. – varro Jun 20 '17 at 19:20
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    This is essentially correct, but it might be interesting to add that the hypothetical "strong stress accent on the first syllable" was replaced by the classical accent type before most of our written sources were initially written down, i.e. 3rd century BC at the very latest. – blagae Jun 20 '17 at 19:33
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    I don't know about the time frame, but it's interesting to note that it occurred in the transformation of the Doric Greek loanword μαχανά to machina. – varro Jun 20 '17 at 19:39
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    Another possible outcome of vowel reduction was "e", in certain contexts. – Asteroides Jun 20 '17 at 20:30
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    Right, in particular when the interior syllable was closed rather than open, e.g, infectus. – varro Jun 20 '17 at 20:35
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    Yes, or before "r" (or sometimes before a consonant cluster ending in r). Regarding vowel quality, as far as I know it is disputed whether short /i/ was [ɪ] in Old Latin; people agree that the realization [ɪ] existed eventually, as a precursor to Proto West Romance *e, but some people like Andrea Calabrese (mentioned in my post here) argue that this was a later development from [i]. I doubt there is any way to know for sure. Calabrese also argues that /eː/ was originally [ɛː], which seems plausible based on comparison with other IE languages. – Asteroides Jun 20 '17 at 20:40
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    You are correct about the environment before [r]. As far as to the quality of short i, while I agree that there is no way to be sure, I would argue that the phenomenon discussed above is prima facie evidence this short vowel was lax in Old Latin, on the grounds that "weakening" an unaccented [ɑ] to a tense [i] seems phonetically implausible. – varro Jun 20 '17 at 20:52
  • @varro: As far as I know, no one proposes a single-step change of [ɑ] to [i]. All the accounts I have looked at consider Latin reduced vowels to have passed through a centralized stage like [ə]; however, this evidently moved in different directions in different contexts, and may have raised to [i]. There are languages where high [i] is the least marked vowel: this seems to be the case for e.g. Yoruba, for which Wikipedia says "oral /i/ is close front [i] [...] nasal /ĩ/ varies between close front [ĩ] and near-close front [ĩ̞]" – Asteroides Jun 20 '17 at 21:30
  • @sumelic: Of course one can posit all sorts of possible developments. I don't want to get into a long discussion on this, but a development path something like [ɑ] -> [ɨ] -> [ɪ] -> [i] seems simpler (and therefore more likely) than something like [ɑ] -> [ɨ] -> [i] -> [ɪ] -> [i] (and I haven't seen any cogent reason to suspect the latter). – varro Jun 20 '17 at 21:54