You are right. This is a very nice
precedent which does away with one part of my counterargument, though of course
the replacement of <pepragatai> by <pepragmenoi eisi> had nothing to
do with pronounceability. The Greeks perhaps found the nasal-less ending of
<pepragatai> confusible with the <-tai> of the 3rd peson singular
and therefore tended to avoid that form.
However, in Greek this use of the
participle in <-meno-> was part of a more general phenomenon. The
third person plural is treated in the same way in the pluperfect
(<pepragmenoi e:san>) and the conjunctive and optative forms of the
perfect mediopassive are periphrastic across the board, even for vocalic
stems: <pepaideumenos o:, pepaideumenos e:is, ...>, <pepaideumenos
eie:n, pepaideumenos eie:s>, etc.). Also, <pepragmenos> is a
productively formed participle which occurs freely in other constructions as
well. For Latin, you'd have to assume a completely isolated survival of a
purely hypothetical periphrastic stage, since *<porta:mini: estis> is not
attested; nor is *<porta:minus>.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 5:26 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Latin -mini 2pl passive; high-order characters
in titles
--- In cybalist@......, "Piotr
Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@......> wrote:
>
... anything as unheard-of as having normally inflected passives for
>
five persons and a periphrastic construction for the sixth.
It happens in
Attic Greek with perfect passives if the stem ends in a
consonant:
luo:
pra:sso:
1s lelumai pepragmai
2s lelusai
pepraxai
3s lelutai pepraktai
1p lelumetha
pepragmetha
2p lelusthe peprakhthe
3p leluntai
--pepragmenoi eisi(n)--
whereas the etymological form should be
*pepragatai, which is found
in Ionic and Homeric Greek.