Me:
>> With a root like *leikW- "leave", the MIE equivalent
>> necessitates a terminating vowel based on syllabics:
>> *leikWa.
Richard:
> What are the two consonants here? /j/ and /kW/?
Yes, exactly. The *i here is functionally treated as a
consonant. Therefore MIE **leikW would have been
considered undesirable syllabics, being CVCC. This
is why *-a is needed. I surmise that *leikWa, being
aorist by default, was conjugated as:
*léikW-am *laikWa-ména
*léikW-as *laikWa-téna
*léikWa *laikW-éna
(NOTE: Remember that unstressed *a is [&] in MIE
while unstressed *e is perhaps [I])
Oh-oh... I feel a rant coming on... :)
--------------------------------------------------
In eLIE, just before Syncope, it would have been
conjugated in the aorist as:
*léikW'm *l'ikW'mén'
*léikW's *l'ikW'tén'
*léikW' *l'ikWén'
(NOTE: *' represents an ultra-short schwa which
*a disintegrated to)
--------------------------------------------------
Right after Syncope, it would become:
*léikWm. *likWmén
*léikWs *likWtén
*léikW *likWén
The 3p *-t was then borrowed from the durative and
added to the aorist 3p singular and plural but
*-men and *-ten lingered afterwards. Since the
vocalism of the durative was typically *e and the
vocalism of the perfect was typically *o, the
aorist aspect followed suit by analogically
developping its own vocalism as well: zero-grade.
This seems like a clear pattern to me but the
motivation for the zeroing in the aorist has to be
pinpointed. Since a-Epenthesis seems to be saying
to me that default stems of a paradigm can't begin
with a zeroed syllable, this period I call "Stage I
Phonotactics" would disallow such a root aorist as
we later find it.
However, Stage II Phonotactics would allow the
thematic aorist (*likWét) to have developped since
it allows for unaccented first syllables to be
zeroed. So while root aorists are ancient, the
_zeroing_ of these root-aorists might in fact be
datable only to Stage III, right before the
disintegration of IE, when accented zeroed
syllables were allowed (as in *wlkWo-). This would
suggest then that the aorist's general vocalism
was affected by analogy with the thematic aorist
with shifted accent... But where then does the
thematic aorist come from and why the shifted
accent?
Since the thematic aorist can only date to Late IE's
Stage II at the earliest, we must start there. This
is the time before Acrostatic Regularisation which
heralded Stage III but a while after Syncope and
a-Epenthesis which started Stage I. So we can't
appeal to MIE and Penultimate Accent to deduce its
etymology. In the end, the only thing I can think
of as a possibility right now is that the thematic
aorist is a subjunctivized aorist since the
subjunctive also adds *-e- to stems. Interestingly
enough, in English the phrases "If I were" and "If
I was" are both used interchangeably where "were"
is preferred since it indicates the hypothetical
nature of the verb, while "was" is also used but
carries a past nuance. Perhaps then there was a
similar merger between the subtle nuances of
*likWét and simple *leikWt causing analogical
zeroing of the root aorist to *likWt.
Of course, not all roots could be reduced to zero
without causing asyllabicity within the paradigm,
a grave no-no in IE grammar (eg: *dehW- "to give"
resists zero in *dohWt "he gives"). Regarding
*leikW-, it could be reduced to zerograde without
this concern. Thus *likW- was spread to all forms
of its default root-aorist paradigm.
At this point, my free-spirited fingers have likely
typed too much, causing disagreement and unrest
amongst others on the Forum who will try no doubt
to undo my zealous explanation of the aorist.
I sure hope so >:)
= gLeN