Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas.

----- Original Message -----

From: petegray

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2000 10:08 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas.

Peter writes:

>There is no such thing as an old imperfect.

 

 I used "imperfect" as shorthand for "the non-present tense of imperfective (i.e., non-aorist) stems", whatever its actual functions in the individual branches (quite different in Indo-Iranian and Greek, BTW). Its inflectional endings were the same as those of the aorist, so the aorist/imperfect contrast doesn't matter in our discussion. I agree with you that this categorical distinction is secondary. All that PIE had was a set of past-tense endings (more or less as in Hittite).

 

>Germanic makes pereterites from Reduplicated forms and the long vowel forms which appear as aorists in I-I and Greek, and as perfects in Latin.

 
The full story is even more complicated than that (the relevance of syllable structure for vowel lengthening, presence of reduplication correlated with the absence of apophony, lack of sigmatic aorists in Gmc., etc.). Anyway, the Germanic strong preterite is at least heavily dependent on the IE "perfect" conjugation, while the inherited Slavic preterite has nothing to do with it (and shows many sigmatic forms, unlike Germanic).

 

>Whatever form is used, it remains true that Germanic and B-S have not separated (or have merged) the endings of perfect and aorist.

 

You're right of course (or almost right, as the Slavic archaism vEdE 'I know' most likely  derives from *woid-xa-i, thus showing at least a lonely reflex of a mediopassive perfect ending as different from both *-mi and *-m), but I hope I've demonstrated that this phenomenon can't be a common innovation.

>I'm sorry!  I meant to write: [secondary tenses in Balto-Slavic] are not marked by the absence of -i! (and esmi etc is of course primary, not secondary)

 

Oh, but they are! The Slavic aorist has the usual endings: *-m, *-s, *-t, ... *-nt, no doubt about that. Baltic preterite conjugations are quite different, but that's the result of radical innovations within Baltic. They don't resemble Germanic forms either; and quite unlike Germanic, Baltic has sigmatic future-tense stems.

 

>You're assuming that the verbal structure of Greek and I-I was present in PIE. That remains at best unproven, at worst unlikely.   At any rate, we cannot work from a debated premise to a firm conclusion.   I accept that this argument could go either way - but note that it remains something that links Germanic and Baltic and Slavic, against Greek and I-I.

 

No, it's only something that links Indo-Iranian, Greek and Armenian, if we regard the augment as an Eastern innovation (which is my view, by the way, and sorry for not expressing this opinion clearly before; I don't in fact believe that the augment ever occurred in any language ancestral to Germanic). The absence of this innovation in Balto-Slavic and Germanic (plus Italic, Celtic, Tocharian, Anatolian, etc.) is a shared archaism -- something that doesn't prove anything about their relationships. On the other hand, IMO there are too few potential "synapomorphies" linking I-Ir., Greek and Armenian (*me: prohibition is another), especially in the phonological domain, for "Proto-Graeco-Armeno-Aryan" to be a viable construct. Remember that *me: occurs also in Albanian, and the obligatory use of the augment (originally a stressed adverb to which the verb was cliticised) is a parallel development, recent enough to be historically observable. Both features look more like late areal innovations than something inherited from a common ancestor. I suppose we're more or less in agreement here.

>There was a suffix -ter or -Hter to denote opposition inrelationship. Perhaps this is connected to the comparative -teros, but it seems to habe produced consonantal stem nouns, whereas -teros is thematic.

 

I didn't mean the *-(H)ter- of kinship terms but the thematic *-ter-o- suffix expressing binary contrasts (as in English other, whether, either) or in Latin alter, inter/exter, dexter/sinister, Greek he:meteros/humeteros 'ours/yours', poteros 'which of the two', etc. The PIE comparative proper was formed using *-jos-/*-is-, but as contrast implies comparison, the "contrastive" forms tended to replace the original comparative in several branches for semantic reasons (the tall one : the short one = taller : shorter); this tendency may be as old as PIE, but certainly wasn't in full swing that early. The conservative forms are still visible in the older dialects of Ancient Greek (especially in Mycenaean); they also gave rise to the formation in -i-o:n < *-is-o:n, very productive in pre-Classical Greek (cf. kakio:n 'worse'). The enormous popularity of -tero- (he:dio:n >> he:duteros 'sweeter') dates mostly to Hellenistic times! Also in Old Indic you can see the gradual regularisation of adjective gradation, with the suffix -tara- (and the accompanying superlative -tama-) ousting more archaic (and more opaque) formations in post-Vedic times.

 

Piotr