Laudator Temporis Acti

Calvert Watkins (1933-2013), "Aspects of Indo-European Poetics," in his Selected Writings, ed. Lisi Oliver, Vol. II: Culture and Poetics (Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1994 = Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, 80), pp. 673-690 (at 688-689):

Consider the traditional English round:

Oats, peas, beans and barley grow

I am not being facetious when I claim that this is an ideal illustration of the Indo-European poet's formulaic verbal art. Consider the order of the elements, which is anything but random. The two cereals oats and barley are distracted, transposed to frame the two legumes peas and beans. The latter are linked by the indexical labial stop and identical vowel /pi-/, /bi-/. Beans must follow peas in order to alliterate with barley. Barley as the only disyllable comes last, in accord with Behagel's [sic, read Behaghel's] law of increasing members, the Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder. And oats must come first, to form a perfect phonetic ring-composition; the whole utterance begins and ends with the vowel /o/: oats, grow.

This particular utterance now functions only to amuse children; its surface linguistic expression is of no great antiquity, though doubtless of many generations, perhaps some centuries older than the present day. But in its essential semantics, formulaics, and poetics it could perfectly well have been periodically re-created on the same model, over the course of the past seven thousand years. We could have before our eyes the transformation of the central merism of an Indo-European agricultural prayer, harvest song, or the like.

Related post: The Law of the Increasing Members.