Re: [tied] Stative Verbs, or Perfect Tense

On this whole topic of the PIE perfect and past tense, there is an
interesting article by Helena Kurzová, "From Indo-European to Latin", which
suggests that PIE had a two-way distinction in nouns and verbs. Nouns were
animate or inanimate, verbs active or "inactive". She suggests that these
lexical verb classes were determined by meaning, and had different endings,
the active verb showing consonantal aorist & present endings, the inactive
verb showing vocalic or laryngeal endings. The inactive verb indicated
statives and processes.

The active verb later develops into imperfective (present tense) and
perfective (aorist tense), while the inactive develops into verbs of state
(perfect) and verbs of process (middle). Because the difference is lexical,
we get root presents (which develop aorists by suffixation), root aorists
(which develop presents by suffixation), root perfects (surviving as fossils
in some IE languages),and root middles (the media tantum, many of which
develop new active forms).

She offers the Hittite middle as the best representative of the PIE inactive
endings that developed into perfects in Greek & Latin. (es-ha-hari,
es-ta-ri, es-a(-ri) ).

She even suggests active roots were CeC, while inactive were CRC or CHC.

Her article is about page 150 - but I've lost the refernce to the journal
it's in!

Peter