Sobre el origen de la escansión larga de la sílaba reduplicada de ἵημι

Abstract

Abstract The reduplicated present ἵημι exhibits an alternating scansion of the reduplication syllable. The iota tends to be long in Attic but short in Homer and in other dialects. Martin Peters explained the long iota as the result of a compensatory lengthening after the loss of laryngeals, i.e. *Hi-Hi̯eh₁- > hīēmi. The short variant would have appeared by analogy with other reduplicated presents such as δίδωμι, ἵστημι, and τίθημι. This implies that the Attic long scansion is an archaism. The purpose of this paper is to show that Peters’ scenario is highly improbable and that the long iota is more likely due to levelling after the conflation of another present *ϝῑ́εμαι with ἵημι’s middle forms.