There is a lot of confusion here, also
because IEsts are a conservative lot and indulge in using traditional terms for
grammatical categories, taken from 19th century grammars of the classical
languages, especially Greek and Sanskrit.
PIE has three ASPECTS and two TENSES; and
the most typical combinations of them (in the indicative mood at least) are the
following (traditional names of PIE "tenses" in quotes):
DURATIVE
AORIST PERFECT
PRESENT
"present" --- "perfect"
PRETERITE
"imperfect"
"aorist" ---
As you can see, the aorist aspect usually
occurs with past-tense reference, hence the tendency to call it a "tense" (one
of the two PIE "past tenses"). But the aorist has other applications as well. I
have already metioned the injunctive (often confusingly defined as a distinct
"mood", while it's only an imperative use of the aorist); and the aorist subjunctive may function as a "future
tense"!
Separating aspect from tense simplifies
things a lot, also didactically. If students of English as a foreign language
are told that the language has sixteen tenses, they are impressed but likely to
panic and to develop a phobic distrust of anything more complex than the present
perfect. But if you explain to them that English has really got only two tenses
([+/- past]), combined with a Cartesian product of modality ([+/- "will"]) and
aspectual distinctions ([+/- progressive], [+/- perfect]), then even relatively
dull minds can grasp the logic of the system and get to terms with its fearful
symmetry.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 5:52
AM
Subject: [tied] Re: PIE grammar made
simple (1)
Piotr says:
> To begin with, PIE has three verb aspects. Let us
call them
"durative", "aorist" and "perfect".
Thank you, Piotr. I
remember old Dr. Haefner attempting to pound Greek
into my thick skull,
and somehow, recall him describing the Greek
aorist (first and second) as
'tenses'. Maybe he did. You say it is an
aspect. The online dictionaries
are circumspect in their definitions
of 'aorist'.
(Sticking my neck
out) A tense describes a verb form which is
*morphologically* marked for
grammatical 'time'. English has only two
such tenses, the present and
preterit (why do you tack on an E
'preterit'). In the more popular sense
(and the one just about every
last English-speaking schoolboy gets taught)
'tense' describes the
verb with its auxiliaries; 'will+infinitive', is
thus the 'simple
future'.
There are *huge* arguments on the 'net
language forums about the exact
definition of 'tense'. I've defined mine,
as well as the usual other.
I've hung around linguistic groups long
enough to learn that the
nomenclature is anything but settled, and one
Ph.D. candidate to the
next invents his own, or modifies the current
fashionable buzzwords to
his own purposes. Babel!