On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 15:10:52 -0500 (EST), Andrew Jarrette
<
anjarrette@...> wrote:
>Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
>>It seems to be the case that verbal forms expressing state
>>are inherently likely to become past tenses. That is borne
>>out by the Germanic and Romance composite perfects ("I have
>>the book read" / "Habeo librum lectum" => "I've read the
>>book" / "He leido el libro"), which we know made the
>>transition from "stative" to "past" in recent history (the
>>same phenomenon in Hittite with the hark-perfect). This is
>>not just an IE thing: the Proto-Semitic stative (still a
>>real stative in Akkadian) has become a perfective past in
>>e.g. Hebrew and Arabic.
>
>
>Yes, but the verb expressing a present state that you have offered
>as an example of the stative ("I have the book read") expressly
>signifies a present state characterized by the fact that a certain
>action was already performed in the past - it points out that something
>occurred in the past which is now finished.
Yes, but only circumstantially. The verb is in the present
tense, compare:
"This is the read book", "I have the read book" and
"This is the red book", "I have the red book".
>So the reference to the
>past was already there, it did not have to evolve from an original
>present reference - unlike the Homeric "perfects" that Peter Gray
>presented, which have absolutely no reference to a past action.
>It is a mystery to me how these "perfects" could evolve to refer
>to a past action.
It kind of depends on the semantics of the verb. The
classic example is (F)oida "I know", the perfect that goes
with the root *weid- "to see". It is easily imaginable how
"I have seen" can become "I know", provided the "I have
seen" verbal form still reflected a _state_, and wasn't just
a simple preterite. I don't think it's possible to go from
an aorist "I saw" or an imperfect "I was seeing" to "I
know".
What you're asking is how it is possible to go from "I know"
to "I knew", or (better take a different verb, because
*woidh2a is special, and was generally fixed as a
"preaterito-present"): if <dedorke> meant "he is gazing" in
Homer, how can it mean "he has gazed"/"he gazed" in
Classical Greek?
I don't know. It doesn't seem possible. If I look for
Homeric <dedorke>, Perseus gives me:
hôs de drakôn epi kheiêi oresteros andra menêisi
bebrôkôs kaka pharmak', edu de te min kholos ainos,
smerdaleon de dedorken helissomenos peri kheiêi:
The English translation suppplied gives:
"And as a serpent of the mountain awaiteth a man at his
lair,
having fed on evil herbs and dread wrath hath entered into
him
and terribly he glareth as he coileth him about within his
lair:"
In this case, one might as well translate "has glared"
(_before_ coiling). The perfect participle one line up
certainly seems to refer to an anterior past: bebrôkôs
"having eaten".
For a present tense translation (the staring simultaneous
with the coiling), I like "stares and stares", which renders
the reduplication nicely.
Perhaps there are better examples in Homer of a perfect with
present meaning, but I suspect a lot depends on the
semantics of each individual verb.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...