Peter:
> So? It's still a prefix.
You were trying to find a prefix that occured in IE.
You mentioned *e-. I stated that this was dialectal
and occured in certain branches only, merely being
one of many isoglosses that exist in the Post-IE
dialect area. Sure, we may say that the satem isogloss
is "IE" however, in reality, it doesn't represent all
of IE nor do we dare reconstruct a Proto-IE *c^ to
explain *k in centum dialects. Whereas, *e/*o ablaut
is a pan-IE feature and can be said to be derived
from Proto-IE itself.
The *e-augment is transparently derived from
a demonstrative with locative meaning, perfect for
spatial as well as temporal usage. While the past
augment may not derive from Proto-IE per se, the
demonstrative can since it is attested throughout
the family.
Now, long before Einstein came up with the connection
between space and time, it turns out that space-time
is hard-coded into our linguistic programming. So *e
is "at that place or time". Due to markedness, a
past tense will more likely be augmented by such
a particle since the present should be the default,
unmarked tense (although this is not always a
hardfast rule, but it's a strong tendency that
can't be ignored). Well, this is what we find --
the demonstrative ends up being used in the past
tense but still not everywhere in IE. Latin has
traces like /e:st/ of course, but it evidently
wasn't such a vital prefix in IE. This suggests
that it was a post-IE innovation.
= gLeN