elmeras2000 wrote:
> And with the imperfect? The imperfect is supposed to not be changing
> the situation. I find this hard to fit together, though I am
> relatively sure it *is* part of the truth.
Well, all this speculation is still tentative, but I find it significant
that the augment gives a preterite meaning to a form that would
otherwise be tense-neutral and non-reporting -- in brief, what we would
call an injunctive. In the same way, prohibitive *méh1 (which behaves
accentually just like the augment) gives the very same forms a modal
meaning; it can be used with both aorist and "present" stems. If *(h1)é
was originally a "reporting" particle later reinterpreted as a tense
marker, its use could have been generalised in the process even if
originally it was used mostly or exclusively with aorist stems. However,
I wouldn't exclude constructions similar to "NOW I'm sitting in my
office and NOW the telephone rings" already at the early stage.
Piotr