IE thematic presents and the origin of their thematic vowel

From: glen gordon
Message: 39794
Date: 2005-08-26

Piotr, on why presents with accented thematic vowel
should be considered ancient:
> Because it seems that the simple thematic presents
> accented on the root vowel were originally
> something else (like subjunctives of root
> aorists), while those in *-je- and *-sk^e-, with an
> accented thematic vowel, have been presents since
> as far back as our reconstructions reach.

Wait, wait. Now why do you add more conjecture: "it
seems that the simple thematic presents accented on
the root vowel were originally something else"? Again,
I'm trying to understand what piece of logic this is
based on but I keep on getting more 'feeeeelings' :)

I don't see anything about thematic presents that one
can say conclusively shows that they are derived from
subjunctives. I can see that it has up to now been
*assumed* by some in this Forum that the thematic
vowel and the subjunctive are identical without firm
basis.

This analysis doesn't seem to respect grammatical
structure of IE **as a whole** and how that _entire_
structure evolved throughout all of its prestages.
*That's* what I'm interested in. Unfortunately,
equating the thematic vowel with the subjunctive
is merely a patchwork solution.

I have a very different account of the thematic vowel
of presents that I like to think is meatier than your
solution. In the earliest stage of IE, I've uncovered
a structured grammar that can account for later
Proto-IE involving 'themes' of *-e- (inherent
durative), *-an- (derived durative), *-as- (derived
aorist). The inherent aorist lacked any marking of
theme but shared the exact same endings with the
duratives in this stage.

The fact that these themes mirror those found in
Tyrrhenian languages is a definite plus, of course,
albeit without the pronominal endings which were
replaced with free pronouns. (Eg: Etruscan /am-e/,
/tur-an/, /sval-as/) The 'theme' idea helps to
understand, for one thing, how the n-infix came into
being (which, of course, can hardly come from anything
else but a suffix anyway, namely *-an-).

The IE subjunctive however is *-he- in my view
(derived from the demonstrative *?e) and can then
help etymologize composite suffixes like the optative
in *-yeh- (*-ye- plus the *he-subjunctive) which
clearly show the *h1.


> Why should this kind of analogy have affected
> precisely those stems whose function is
> unambiguously presentive by virtue of the
> characteristic suffixes mentioned above?

Because tense is a late feature of the IE verb.
Evidently so, since we both know that tense marking
remained second fiddle to aspect and mood in the
final stages of IE. The past *e-augment is only
dialectal and the *-i ending is not "presentive" so
much as "indicative". A slight difference. Tense
is curiously weakly anchored into the language if it
were truly ancient as you suggest here.

So when you refer to these verbs marked in *-ye- or
*-ske- as "presentive", while in the same breath
speaking of pre-IE, I believe this clouds your
judgment of what the verbs really must once have
been. Since tense is surely a recent feature, what
these verbs must have originally signified was
something *else* that would then likely make them
"unambiguously presentive" later on. "Presentive"
cannot be the most fundamental characteristic of
these forms.


> But the sigmatic aorist is accented on the root!

Yes, the sigmatic aorist is but I wasn't speaking of
that at all. I've traced that back to the derived
aorists with the theme *-as-, in case you're
interested :)

I was speaking of the NON-sigmatic _thematic_ aorist.
Eg: *weid- => *wid-é-t. Those originate from certain
inherent aorist verb roots in MIE. At that stage,
they still had accent on the root just like other
stems like *dehW-t. However, when Syncope hit, MIE
*wéidata had no choice but to become eLIE *widét
(not **weidt) because of the CCC-avoidance rule I
like to call Accent Shift.

These thematic aorists survived Acrostatic
Regularization because that event only concerned
itself with stems with accentuation that alternated
between two syllables of a single stem (like
durative *kWereti), something that the thematic
aorists never did. So since the thematic aorists
survived right down to IE, they could very well serve
as the accentual analogy for aorists in *-ske- and
*-ye- turned duratives.

What? Aorists turned duratives? Am I crazy? Not if
there was a semantic shift of the "aorist" and
"durative". Originally, the aorist category must have
once owned some of the verbs that are now considered
durative, which explains the origin of athematic
stems like *esti as being originally aorist in MIE:
*esta.


= gLeN


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