--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
> More importantly, the *-s in the 3rd. person preterite is
> also a feature of Tocharian. The paradigm *-h2a, *-tha,
> *-0-s, 3pl. *-r.-s can surely be reconstructed for PIE, as
> it wouldn't have arisen twice independently in Anatolian and
> in Tocharian (or to quote Jasanoff: "the chances of the same
> scenario having played itself out twice, once in Anatolian
> and once in Tocharian, are virtually nil").
My thoughts about that doctrine are a follows:
Is the fact that the preterite of the hi-conjugation and the
Tocharian preterite III agree in showing an -s- in the 3sg only
really so important that we have to change the classical doctrine of
the IE verbal system for that reason? I do not think so. For one
thing, the two languages disagree fundamentally in the middle voice
which has a pervasive -s- in Tocharian, but nothing of the sort in
Anatolian. All we need is to find a way for a 3sg ending of the s-
aorist to get a fixed place in a preterite paradigm descended from
the IE perfect. It demands no particular explanation that the two
categories have been combined into a preterite, for that is found in
many other branches also. The picture shown by Hittite and Tocharian
could be arrived at without force if, in the blending of the two
categories, the aorist offered the basis and the perfect was an
intruder which spread more and more in its new grammatical position.
By that process the perfect would increasingly replace the whole
morphology of the aorist. The last stronghold of the aorist would be
precisely the pivotal 3sg, so that, right before the complete
vanishing of the suppletion, there would have been a structure with -
s- only in that form. It may have been a contributing factor that
the 3sg of the perfect had no consonantal marking, so that the
surviving *-s(t) of the aorist would be preferable to a zero-
consonant form even after the merger of the two. These facts are
inherited and so shared by the two branches, so that they do not
necessarily constitute significant points of agreement.
If it is not possible that "this could happen twice" (although it
really is not exactly the same thing that has happened), then what
follows is rather this: Then the precursors of Anatolian and
Tocharian may have left the IE unity *together* and, in an interim
period before splitting from each other, have developed their
special unification of the s-aorist and the perfect (if special and
specifically theirs it is). That could surely produce the result we
find.
Jens