> if scholars were aware that in Homer the perfect most commonly expresses a
> present tense (condition or attitude), why is it that the traditional view
> is considered to be that the perfect (stative) expresses a completed
> action, or a present "state resulting from previous action or experience"
> (thus in Sihler)? Did the traditional IE linguists discount these Homeric
> "perfects", or did they not know about them?
[Peter:] The traditional view is based on the Classical Greek pattern. (It
must be, since this "state as a result" is not regular in any other
language.) It is part of the old habit of giviing excessive priority to
what we see in Classical Greek and Sanskrit, and quite a few scholars have
been challenging this for some time. Our understanding of the tenses is now
somewhat different.
> I actually have never read the traditional view anywhere,
[Peter:]
You'll find it reproduced somewhat uncritically by Szemerényi "Introduction
to IE linguistics" section 9.4.3 (d), page 293. If you don't don't
Szemerényi's book, it's worth paying out for a copy, even though he is
rather conservative in some ways (e.g. resisting laryngeals!) The value of
the book is that he gives all the essential information and allows readers
to draw very different conclusions from his own (mostly)
> How did a Homeric "perfect" with explicitly present, stative meaning
> evolve into a form which indicated completed, no-longer-occurring action
> or experience? Why would it evolve so?
[Peter:]
"Why" is a difficult question to answer in linguistics. It is, however, an
understandable pattern: those verbs that can be understood as resultative
gradually predominate, and the others are used gradually less.
Peter