From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 46729
Date: 2006-12-23
----- Original Message -----From: Piotr GasiorowskiSent: Friday, December 22, 2006 6:19 PMSubject: Re: [tied] Re: Ablaut, hi-conjugation, stress alternation, etcOn 2006-12-22 20:08, Patrick Ryan wrote:
>
> Well, I am not a Slavicist by any means, so I will not characterize
> your statement as wrong but in my opinion it is.
>
> The contrast in Russian, at least, is between perfective and
> imperfective.
>
> The perfective preverb pro- produces prochitayu, 'I shall read
> _through_'. This, to me, is clearly durative rather than punctual.
No, <proc^itaju> is punctual and means simply 'I shall read' (the
punctual counterpart of durative <c^itaju> 'I am reading', never mind
the _etymological_ meaning of the prefix. The same is true of Pol.
przeczytam and similar forms in all north Slavic languages, where the
present forms of perfective stems function as the punctual future tense.***
Well, I guess Neville Forbes, author of _The Russian Verb_, published by Oxford University (1974), is wrong then, for he translates proc^itayu as 'I shall read through' on p. 7 of that book.
Does not budu c^itat mean 'I shall read'?
If what you were saying were true, Piotr, then Russian would not have a perfective but only a punctual.
Patrick