From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 36500
Date: 2005-02-26
Vixerunt (Cicero's famous one-word speech) = They are dead.
Fuit Ilium = Troy is no more.
>I would therefore not count the examples you give as examples of verbs in
>the perfect >having present meaning, rather I would call them examples of
>verbs which indicate a >former state, a past state, that is no more.
Your point is well made: Latin stresses the completion - the action is over
and finished - that is where the strength of the verb, and its present
meaning, comes from. There is a difference between these Latin forms and
the counterpart in Greek, where the action can continue into the present.
Peter
_________________________Yes, and I just don't see why Homeric perfects with unquestionably present, as-it-happens meaning (indicating a condition or attitude) should evolve into a form that denotes something that has been completed (or, in other languages, something that happened in the past). One of the respondents to my question said that perhaps these Homeric (and Rgvedic) perfects with present meaning are not an original formation, that this use was a later development of a tense that indicated past action (whether just completed or long ago). But I don't see how the converse could happen, a past tense evolving into a present tense. I think I will have to learn Homeric Greek and read these texts in the original, I am suspicious about the translation (not to mention Vedic as well)! (Of course, I am kidding).