--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <G&P@...> wrote:
> You're not alone. Some people (eg Szemerényi) hold on to the
traditional
> idea. But the new one gives some insights, explanations, and
understandings
> that may be worth sacrificing the old idea for.
The new one, if I understand this correctly to mean the assessment
of the perfect as the expression of a state rather than an action,
is not *very* new. It is what Chantraine and Renou found for Homeric
Greek and Vedic in the 1920's, and it is already in Delbrück's
syntax volumes from the 1880's.
Still, I am not convinced that the "state" interpretation is the
full story. It may be the full story about the *origin* of the
perfect, but is it the full story of the state of affairs in the IE
protolanguage? Can it really be just by coincidence that the perfect
so often ends up being a past-tense form? It is its normal fate in
Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Albanian, Tocharian, and even Anatolian. I
do not find examples of past-tense forms derivable from perfects in
Balto-Slavic or Armenian, but that could reflect some other
standardization.
The testimony of Anatolian is important here: The old endings of the
perfect are continued in the past of the hi-conjugation, not in its
present which was marked by the addition of *-i on the pattern of
forms like *-mi : *-m of the mi-conjugation.
I think this indicates that the perfect of normal action verbs
already had a strong functional affinity with past tense in PIE.
What is completed is now in the past.
Jens