On Wed, 26 May 2004, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
> [...] I have no theory about the Indo-Iranian
> intensive. I had never studied it before. I had seen it
> mentioned in the literature as a reduplicated o-grade
> formation, so I assumed it was that. Seeing the actual
> Vedic forms, which as Macdonell rightly says, are
> "inflected, in both active and middle, like a verb of the
> third or reduplicated class", left me somewhat puzzled as to
> the confidence with which these forms have been claimed to
> show o-grade, especially seeing that LIV has only two or
> three non-Indo-Iranian parallels to offer, none of which
> show o-grade, and none of which I think firmly establish the
> reduplicated intensive as a verbal category in PIE.
>
> I'm not saying the intensive didn't have o-grade. I was
> merely wondering whether there were additional reasons to
> think that the absence of palatalization of velars in this
> case can be explained _only_ through o-grade, when other
> possibilities are imaginable. I haven't heard any yet.
Well, the evidence should not be misrepresented, and I'm not going to make
it prettier than it is. The intensive shows ablaut between full-grade and
zero-grade with precisely the same distribution as reduplicated presents.
The intensive is quite generally considered to have o-vocalism in the
full-grade forms, but the question is, is that really known with
certainty? Hiersche identified it with o-grade presents of other
languages, for which he also saw the same function; that would be a point
in favour of -o-. I believe I have shown that the Balto-Slavic forms with
which the presumed "o/e-type" is compared reflect irrefutable traces of
reduplication. That was enough for me: Hiersche's o-grade representative
of the reduplicated intensive was itself once reduplicated. That has made
me regard the o/e-type of the hi-conjugation as the continuation of the
intensive in its stem-formation, and as the perfect in its inflection.
Since the intensive and the perfect are facts we have to accept anyway, I
prefer to make do with them and so dispense with the special
"H2e-conjugation". It is my impression that all of the characteristics of
the forms adduced in evidence can be explained without the asumption of a
special category.
Jens