Re: [tied] -hi, -mi

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <G&P@...> wrote:

> >> Basically he goes through a number of existing Hittite hi-paradigm
> >> verbs plus their other-IE cognates and shows that the hi-
> > paradigms
> >> might as well have been the orinal for that verb in PIE.
>
> Pardon me, but isn't this precisely what PIE has been saying for

years?

> That certain verbs, mainly statives, took a set of endings which

became

> the -hi endings in Hittite, and the perfect (or a basis for the

middle) in

> other languages?
>
> What is new in what he says?
>

Everybody (so I read) has given up the idea that Hittite hi-verbs were
once stative, since those roots are no more stative semantically than
those of the mi-verbs. He declares himself that his predecessors tried
to derive all those inflectional categories which have endings that
are supposedly related to those of the hi-verbs from one of those
categories and got into trouble on the way, he himself (he says)
abandons that quest and tries to show, verb by verb, that they might
once have inflected as the hi-verbs (and once he's done that, he
enters on that same quest himself).


Torsten