Jens:
> I am also at a loss to explain the lack of accentual movement in
> the strong forms of the perfect: why do the endings *-H2e, *-tH2e,
> *-e not cause the accent to move?
Torsten:
> Alscher (I've mentioned his name to you once)
>
> http://members.pgv.at/homer/INDOEURO/afroasia.htm
>
> thinks the IE perfect suffixes are identical to the Semitic
> preterite prefixes, in whatever way that has come about.
Alscher's site in fact inspired me to look further into IE grammar
and find my own answers. While I think that there is a very remote
genetic affiliation with Semitic, the real reasons for the perfect
have to come from comparisons with closer language groups like
Tyrrhenian, Uralic, Altaic and EA to make any sense of this.
What is transparent to me, as opposed to Jens, is that the vowels
_are_ supposed to be there. There's nothing wrong with them because
they reflect eLIE unaccented *a in final position. I've already
stated in numerous examples that Suffix Resistance normally prevents
monosyllabic suffixes from losing their vowel during Syncope. So the
perfect endings were no exception. Also, the 2ps *-txe cannot be
original because it violates earlier phonotactics. Instead it seems
that analogy with 1ps *-xe worked on it to produce a rhyming *-txe.
We should end up with MIE perfect endings *-he, *-te, *-e in the
singular. What Jens is confused about is what the parallels are in
Uralic et al. That's actually simple once we see that there was a
shift in semantic usage of the endings. The perfect endings here all
contain *-e, an attached deictic used as a transitivizing marker.
Originally, the perfect endings were _intransitive_ endings and thus
used often times with statives. There's the connection. Once they
were marked with *-e, they served the new function of perfect-stative
regardless of transitivity.
The early IndoTyrrhenian intransitive set *[-ah, -at, (-a)] relate to
intransitives in Boreal, ancestral to Uralic and EA, where *-h was
replaced with either *-N or *-k (the jury of mine is still out on which
one).
In that way, these underlying intransitives can be linked to prefixed
stative morphemes in AfroAsiatic (in a sense) but that's like linking
English pronouns directly with those in Pashto. It's a mess to sort out
without knowing the in-betweens.
= gLeN