From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 36501
Date: 2005-02-26
> 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 Szemer�nyi "Introduction
to IE linguistics" section 9.4.3 (d), page 293. If you don't don't
Szemer�nyi'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
________________________Then I would like to know which perfects in Homeric Greek were resultative, and compare their meaning to those perfects that indicate a present condition or attitude, and see what the common ground is, since they share perfect endings.
It is interesting that this "state as a result" idea only applies to Classical Greek; I am aware that the perfect/stative forms came to be used as a simple past tense in Sanskrit and Germanic. But the Germanic preterite-present verbs are a clear example of perfect/stative forms being used with present meaning (some of which, Sihler says, could be understood as arising from completed past action, but he points out, as I believe you did as well, that any present tense verb could be so analyzed). I guess much will remain a mystery in IE linguistics.