On Wed, 04 Aug 2004 21:32:09 +0000, elmeras2000
<
jer@...> wrote:
>I was trying in all fairness to salvage your idea that
>the *-e of the perfect endings was a general object marker added to
>a verbal form which typically had no specific object, an analysis
>which would make the perfect an antipassive. You do not like that
>analysis, and I see nothing much going for it either, so your
>analysis cannot be given this rationale.
I suppose we can agree that the *-e of the perfect endings,
at least in the singular, acts in every respect as a
secondary addition. It does not attract the accent, it does
not affect the o-grade of the verbal root. Logically, the
perfect/middle endings at some point in pre-PIE, before the
addition of *-e, was therefore:
1. *-h2
2. *-th2
3. *-0
It's possible that the Skt. 1sg. middle past ending -i
directly reflects this, as well as the Hittite 1sg.
hi-conjugation preterite -hun (< *-h2-m., not *-h2a-m).
If I'm correct that the 1/2 sg. endings derive from a
Nostratic stative in *-k, *-tk, the development *-k > *-h2
also requires that the velar stop once stood in the absolute
Auslaut.
As to the nature of the *-e, my best guess is that it is
indeed the thematic vowel. Assuming the same element was
added both to the perfect and the middle, we see that the
middle forms have *o before *-r, *-m, *-i (*-t-o-r,
*-dhw-o-m, *-nt-o-i), which is consistent with an
interpretation as the thematic vowel. Two problems remain:
the fact that the vowel appears as *a after *h2 (e.g.
*-h2ai), and the fact that in some middle forms, the vowel
appears as *-o when nothing follows. I would suggest that
the first phenomenon is regular: a thematic vowel coloured
by *h2 does not yield *o before a voiced segment (we see the
same in archaic forms of the word "woman", such as Greek
gunaik- and Armenian kanay- < *gWn.h2-a-ih2-). The second
phenomenon (-o for expected -e in the middle), I would
explain analogically: the (past) middles in -o were
secondarily created by deleting the middle marker *-i, when
that had been re-interpreted as a present marker.
If the *-e is the thematic vowel, it needs to be explained
why in the perfect/middle system it appears _after_ the
desinences, instead of _before_ them, as in the active
system. The only solution I can think of requires that the
thematic vowel in these forms indeed be an object marker
(somehow connected to the anaphoric pronoun *i/*e-),
something which is otherwise impossible to prove. It's as
if in the active system, incorporation proceeded according
to the model V-O-S, while in the "stative" (perfect/middle)
system, incorporation followed the model V-S-O. Given the
fact that the active and the stative systems are
fundamentally different (e.g. in their desinences), I can
see no problem with the assumption that they were formed
according to very different models of agglutination
(enclitic syntax).
On the other hand, the thematic vowel marking the
subjunctive, being a modification of the verbal stem itself
(turning it into a [thematic] adjective?), must always be
closely linked to the verbal stem, regardless of whether the
form belongs to the active or the stative system. In this
analysis, we would then expect a "stative" conjunctive to
show the desinences:
1. *-a-h2(a)
2. *-e-th2(a)
3. *-e-(e).
It is trivial to derive a form like the Latin future (<
conjunctive) in -a:m, -e:s, -e:t from such a "stative
conjunctive".
which
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...