Odp: [tied] Re: PIE grammar made simple (1)

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 7228
Date: 2001-04-27

There is a lot of confusion here, also because IEsts are a conservative lot and indulge in using traditional terms for grammatical categories, taken from 19th century grammars of the classical languages, especially Greek and Sanskrit.
 
PIE has three ASPECTS and two TENSES; and the most typical combinations of them (in the indicative mood at least) are the following (traditional names of PIE "tenses" in quotes):
 
               DURATIVE         AORIST        PERFECT
 
  PRESENT      "present"        ---           "perfect"
 
  PRETERITE    "imperfect"      "aorist"      ---
 
As you can see, the aorist aspect usually occurs with past-tense reference, hence the tendency to call it a "tense" (one of the two PIE "past tenses"). But the aorist has other applications as well. I have already metioned the injunctive (often confusingly defined as a distinct "mood", while it's only an imperative use of the aorist); and the aorist subjunctive may function as a "future tense"!
 
Separating aspect from tense simplifies things a lot, also didactically. If students of English as a foreign language are told that the language has sixteen tenses, they are impressed but likely to panic and to develop a phobic distrust of anything more complex than the present perfect. But if you explain to them that English has really got only two tenses ([+/- past]), combined with a Cartesian product of modality ([+/- "will"]) and aspectual distinctions ([+/- progressive], [+/- perfect]), then even relatively dull minds can grasp the logic of the system and get to terms with its fearful symmetry.
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: markodegard@...
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 5:52 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: PIE grammar made simple (1)

Piotr says:
> To begin with, PIE has three verb aspects. Let us call them
"durative", "aorist" and "perfect".

Thank you, Piotr. I remember old Dr. Haefner attempting to pound Greek
into my thick skull, and somehow, recall him describing the Greek
aorist (first and second) as 'tenses'. Maybe he did. You say it is an
aspect. The online dictionaries are circumspect in their definitions
of 'aorist'.

(Sticking my neck out) A tense describes a verb form which is
*morphologically* marked for grammatical 'time'. English has only two
such tenses, the present and preterit (why do you tack on an E
'preterit'). In the more popular sense (and the one just about every
last English-speaking schoolboy gets taught) 'tense' describes the
verb with its auxiliaries; 'will+infinitive', is thus the 'simple
future'.

There are *huge* arguments on the 'net language forums about the exact
definition of 'tense'. I've defined mine, as well as the usual other.

I've hung around linguistic groups long enough to learn that the
nomenclature is anything but settled, and one Ph.D. candidate to the
next invents his own, or modifies the current fashionable buzzwords to
his own purposes. Babel!