Piotr:
> But what's your basis for believing that all root
> presents are secondary?
When you mean "root presents" are you talking about
athematic presents? The vast majority of presents
are thematic, no? So it would be even more outrageous
to claim that the vaster list of thematic stems are
all secondary!
> If a durative verb had to be derived from an
> aorist, the most common morphological markers were
> *-je/o- or *-sk^e/o-, or a nasal infix.
Yes, but *-ye- is given to both noun and verb stems
equally. We also have things like Hittite /newahh-/
'to make new', a factitive based on *newo-, even
though *-h2- is normally applied to other verb stems,
not adjectives. Seems to me like the earliest IE had
a more liberal set of rules on derivation than you
are suggesting above.
On Tocharian inherited subjunctives:
> This squares well with the hypothesis that the
> shift from subjunctive to durative meaning took
> place gradually after the IE breakup.
So subjunctives correlate mostly with aorist stems
in Tocharian, not presents? Did I get that right?
I'll think about that some more.
On 'Clipping':
> How does that explain the pattern *wé:g^H-s-t vs.
> wég^H-s-n.t? It doesn't seem to be any different
> from *ste:u-ti vs. *stew-n.ti .
Yes, right. I guess that's because of accent shifting
between the singular and plural. Naturally an
unaccented *e: will shorten to *e by regular ablaut,
immediately after Syncope. In any event, *s lengthens
the expected vowel in both forms. We'd normally
expect *e/zero ablaut without the sigmatic affix but
we get the lengthened *e:/*e ablaut instead.
However, *ste:u-ti is different because it lacks a
clear motivation for the length in my theory thus
far. If I use everything I know to date, Narten
presents have to occur sometime after Syncope
when lengthened vowels are first made possible.
Lengthening occurs in aorists and nominatives, as
well as inanimate collectives in *-x. I figure
somewhere in that mess is the source of Narten
presents, and something tells me it relates to the
'more liberal set of rules' of pre-IE that I
mentioned above.
> "Pre-sigmatic" here only means root aorists -- a
> class which was on the decline, giving way to the
> transparently aoristic *-s-stems.
Oh, okay. But I think that there were always the
sigmatic aorists alongside the root aorists so
there still isn't any 'pre-sigmatic' stage. I guess
that should be understood as 'Root Aorist Decline'
or RAD for short :)
> Yes, I also assume an originally accented suffix,
> the only difference between us being that I don't
> see much evidence for the *h1. Not that I can
> exclude it absolutely, but I think Ockham is on
> my side until such evidence can be presented.
Grr. Yes it is. Well played >:) But it's not over
yet.
> If one accept's Jens's infix theory, pretonic
> **O-swe:p- becomes **O-swep-, then the remaining
> full vowel attracts the accent; next, the still
> consonantal *O gets metathesised and eventually
> vocalised, [...]
So why not **sOwe:p- then? Why is *O doing an ad
hoc dosey-doh?
> In the case of *ste:w-é- we have the usual
> shortening of the pretonic long vowel and the
> retraction of accent, but no lengthening by
> contraction, hence the outcome *stéw-e-.
Yes I would think basically the same thing except
that **ste:w-é- never exists. It is simply *stew-é-
by way of the post-Syncope ablaut with the existing
strong form *ste:w-. Then Acrostatic Regularization
causes *stéw-e-.
But... I just still don't know where those Narten
presents really come from exactly!
= gLeN
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