MCLSSAA2@...:
>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:
Hmmm, you weren't here when I talked about the Mid IE penultimate accent?
Certainly the *e- augment is something particular to a few dialects only and
formed rather late. The original meaning of *e appears to be a general
locative/temporal one, meaning "here, now" or "there, then"... hence its
later use as a past marker. The particle *e is also attested in Anatolian
languages where past markers are nowhere to be seen: Hittite apa- "this",
Luwian /apa-/ "he, that", Lydian /ebad-/ "here, there" and Lycian /ebe-/
"here, there" (< IE *e-bho-).
>{!ele'ikWet} = "he was leaving" / {!eleikWe't} = "he left".
So... I prefer *leikWt since it must be an older form than the *e-augmented
forms... and isn't *leikW- a non-thematic verb?
>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.
Are you speaking of stages before Common IE? Starting from 7000 BCE onward,
my view is that IE started with a mild initial accent, subsequently turning
into a penultimate stress accent (by 6500 BCE) and then finally after all
final vowels were dropped (c.5500 BCE), the nature of the accent was
obscured, producing the familiar "mobile" stress accent which then eroded
unstressed vowels producing the zero grade (by 5000 BCE). And then IE
started breaking up by about 4000 BCE.
>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.
Yes, they dug it up alright. I think that suffix is quite old and originally
a *-t suffix.
- gLeN
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