--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
wrote:
> I was wondering once if the -s- of *h2wegs- might be the result of
a
> back-formation from an s-perfect (not that I know much about it)?
If you mean s-aorist, we may be in business. It seems that the
sigmatic aorist belongs so often with an sk-present that the
conclusion is forced upon us that their original functional nuance
was the same. Now, with the sk-verbs that is known to be inchoative.
Extrapolating from there, one will think of *H2wegs- as 'begin to
grow', while *H2ewg- is just 'grow'. That looks nice, but I am not
sure it is correct. My reservations are as follows:
The sigmatic aorist does not cause the root-vowel to change its
place in the consonant skeleton. Still, Benveniste has a rule that
it should: "un thème à l'état I n'admet pas d'élargissement; seul
l'état II en comporte" (Origines 153). He quotes the s-aorist *prek^-
s- which to him is from a root *per- forming zero-grade *pr- +
suffixe -ek^- + élargissement -s-. Now, that is fine, but only
because the root was really *prek^-, not *perk^- (except if changed
to that). There is no reference to a root structure *TeRT- which
forms s-aorist *TReT-s-. Actually the aorist stem of *deyk^- 'point'
is *de(:)yk^s-, not §*dyé(:)k^s-, cf. Lat. di:xi: and Avest. da:is^,
imperative do:is^.i:. In fact not a single example in the list of s-
aorists found in Macdonell's Vedic Grammar (§ 522) or in LIV's index
shows such a transformation. I have often wondered how Benveniste
got away with writing all the nonsense he is quotable for.
An alternative identification of the aorist -s- is with the
reflexive pronoun *s(w)e 'oneself' which core is /s/. The there
could even be some sense in the fact that *H2ewg- means 'augment,
make bigger', while *H2wegs- is 'grow bigger', i.e. 'make oneself
bigger'. The same would apply to *H2elk- and *H2leks- 'ward off,
defend', which could also quite well be base-verb and reflexive.
However, these speculations cut back into a pre-PIE morphology we
cannot control.
Jens