Old Icelandic veri


In Modern Icelandic the form veri of the verb vera ‘to be’ is seen as a subjunctive expressing a wish. Treating Old Norse veri, earlier vesi, as an imperative of the third person simplifies the vera paradigm. A survey of the oldest attestations shows that veri not only fits qua form in the imperative paradigm, but also behaves like an imperative and expresses a command. The hypothesis that veri is an imperative can be extended to: Old Norse had an imperative of the 3rd person consisting of stem+i. What usually is called the use of the 3rd person subjunctive to fill in for the missing 3rd person imperative, would then be nothing else than a real imperative, which, however, in all verbs except vera coincides in form with the subjunctive. The form verir looks like a counter example to the hypothesis, but it is only found twice in poetry, never in prose, and can be explained as a common copying error. We cannot ask the native speakers of Old Norse, so the description of Old Norse veri as a subjunctive is a hypothesis as well. It is argued that seeing veri as an imperative is the more elegant solution.