On Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:49:37 +0000, P&G
<
petegray@...> wrote:
>>I still do not insist upon it, for it is based on the second person:
>>*weg^h-s-esi rhyming with *esi, therefore ipf.sbj. in *-se:s rhyming with
>>*e:s. On top of this it works with the augment, which however scares me
>>less.
>
>The augment in Latin scares me more, but then I'm rather conservative.
If I may barge into the discussion, the surprising thing to
me about the Latin imperfect subjunctive is not the /e:/,
which is after all a Latin subjunctive morpheme in its own
right. The strange thing is the /s/. The a:-form of the
verb "to be" is simply, and as expected, *es-a:-m, *es-a:-s
etc. (> eram, era:s). For the e:-form we would expect
*es-e:-m, *es-e:-s > *erem, *ere:s, but we find in fact
essem, esse:s. Now the forms of the Latin perfectum are all
based on the perfect stem + corresponding forms of the verb
"to be" (pf.subj. ama:v&- + sim, si:s > ama:verim, -eri(:)s;
pqpf. ind. ama:v&- + eram, era:s > amaveram, -era:s;
pqpf.subj. ama:v&- + essem, esse:s > ama:vissem, -isse:s;
fut.ex. ama:v&- + ero:, eris > ama:vero:, -eris). In the
infectum, it's more usual to have periphrastic formations
based on *bheuH- (ama:bam, ama:bo:), but it wouldn't be very
surprising in itself if the impf.subj. were also based on
verbal root + past subjunctive of *es-. If the e:-form had
reguralized the zero-grade of the root, the forms would have
been *se:m, *se:s, *se:t, *se:mus, *se:tis, *se:nt, which is
exactly what we find as the endings of the impf.subj. in the
infectum. The verb esse itself secondarily added *e(s)- to
that (as in the 2pl.pres. *stes > estis) for its independent
forms (essem, esse:s), and those forms were then added to
the perfectum stem to create the pqpf.subj.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...