--- In cybalist@..., "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:
> How should one write the 3ps of *ed-? If I recall, I mistakingly
> wrote **edet, unintentionally putting a thematic between *d and
> *t... but then what does one write? Shouldn't it be written *ett
> (whilst phonetically *[etst])?
If only parchment had been known at the time - sigh sigh daydream -
the PIE speakers kept plenty of sheep to make it from their skins, if
only they had known how to - but as long as literacy depended on the
climate being dry enough for clay tablets to survive long-term, and/or
them being in reach of Egypt to import blank papyrus in bulk, no hope.
> ... *ed- be in the perfect in this particular case?
"And then the wolf ate the lamb" occurs in the time-line of the
events, not as a back-reference, so it should be present aspect past
tense?
> Damn, what the hell is the 3ps perfect of *ed-... *edede?? *e:de?
Greek perfects such as ele:lutha (I have gone) from e:luthon (I went),
elthei^n (to go (momentary)), give me the impression that:
- If a PIE word seems to start with a vowel, it actually started with
H1 (= glottal stop), as in German and Arabic.
- Perfect reduplication was by duplicating the first consonant and e.
- Past tense augment was by prefixing {!e-}
- But if the verb started with H1, reduplication and augment were the
same, so in that case to distinguish they reduplicated the next
consonant also: root !ludh, perfect !le!ludh2e = "I have gone".
(Greek later extended this process by analogy to verbs which started
with a vowel where the original initial consonant was H2 or H3.)
For {!ed-} = "eat", I would guess {!ede!ed-} or similar, changing to
{ede:d-}. I seem to remember Greek {ede:edoka} = "I have eaten".
> Help, ... IE is too complicated. Why can't it be like Esperanto :)
That is in the history of PIE. Likely originally there was no
zero-grading, and every consonant had a vowel after. Then they started
distinguishing durative from momentary in verbs by moving the accent:
{!ele'ikWet} = "he was leaving" / {!eleikWe't} = "he left". Later the
stress pattern tried to shift to stress accent, but pitch accent
reasserted itself later, but in the meantime a bout of dropping of
unstressed vowels started, causing zero-grading. But not every verb is
phonetically amenable to that way of forming a momentary past (=
aorist), so they dug up an "s" suffix from somewhere and started using
it to form aorists.