Re: PIE meaning of the Germanic dental preterit

On 2008-03-04 01:10, alexandru_mg3 wrote:

>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com <mailto:cybalist%40yahoogroups.com>,
> Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> >
> > On 2008-03-04 00:47, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
> > ems that you have problems to remember well what I said
> > >
> > > I said that: ORIGINARY THERE WERE SPECIFIC VERBAL <VERB>-DHEH1
> > > FORMATIONS IN PIE
> > >
> > > And that the number of such PIE formation arrived to be relevant
> > > because some daughter languages (Germanic, Baltic, etc...) arrived
> to
> > > generalized this formations and to use them as an Morphological-
> > > Pattern in order to construct new Verbal-Aspects.
> >
> > Ah, so you do believe that the Germanic weak preterite goes back to a
> > PIE formation. I deny that, so we do disagree about something :)
> >
> > Piotr
>
>
> Not to a specific one -> you like to quote me with what I never said :)
> Is the third time that you try to do this...
>
> => it is a Germanic innovation that has generalized in a Verbal-Aspects
> some existing PIE dHeh1-verbs...

But that's precisely what I disagree with. The Germanic weak preterite
does not continue _any_ PIE pattern, least of all any kind of
Verb-*dHeh1- compound. Its form is too similar to that of the *-to-
participle to be based on anything else. So the first part of the
construction is not a bare verb stem but a PIE verbal adjective
(functioning as the past participle). The whole thing looks for all the
world like an original periphrastic tense, not a grammaticalised
compound. Typologically, such "participle plus auxiliary" constructions
are very common and have been created independently in numerous
languages. Surely if Polish has a preterite continuing the univerbated
Slavic neo-perfect (szedl/em 'I went' < *s^IdlU (j)esmI 'I am gone') and
if coalescence of this type involving the verb 'be' is not unknown
elsewhere (not to mention explicitly periphrastic comstructions like <I
an gone> or <je suis allé>) -- it still doesn't follow that PIE had
*h1es- verbs somehow reflected in the Slavic neo-perfect. (Not that the
presence of *-h1es- cannot be suspected in some complex verb stems in
PIE, esp. the desiderative, but that's an independent story.

Piotr