glen gordon wrote:
> 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.
Well, the label "present", when applied to a type of stem in PIE _stem_
is a matter of Aktionsart (durative/progressive or
iterative/continuative) or aspect (imperfective) rather than tense.
This, I assume, is common knowledge, even if the traditional terminology
is potentially confusing. Tense distinctions are indeed recent and
superficial.
>>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 :)
You are in favour of pairing *s-aorists with *sk^e-presents, aren't you?
So am I, though we would disagree about the fine details. I thought you
wanted to say that the accent pattern of the *sk^e-presents followed
that of the _corresponding_ aorists (which is obviously not the case).
> 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.
There are also oxytone presents like *gWr.h3-é- or *tud-é-, though they
are significantly less common than the barytone type. In general,
non-suffixed present and aorist stems (whether simple, with partial
reduplication or intensive) are nearly identical in terms of structure.
This means that the present/aorist contrast was purely lexical and
not expressed by morphological or phonological means, although
eventually it came to be reinforced through the use of specialised
suffixes. There are two interesting points of difference: we have simple
Narten presents (athematic) and simple barytone thematic presents, while
in the aorist system the use of Narten alternations is restricted to the
sigmatic stems and the barytone thematic type is missing altogether.
My suspicion is that the barytone thematic type (*bHér-e-) is the
subjunctive of the lost pre-sigmatic Narten aorist,
**bHé:r-t/**bHér-n.t; this would explain its accent and vocalism without
any extra assumptions. The relation is exactly like that between the
present *sté:w- and its subjunctive *stéw-e-. The Narten character of
the root prevents the accent from remaining on the thematic vowel (for a
similar phenomenon, compare the ordinary causative *mon-éje- with the
Narten subtype *swó:p-je-). If accepted, this hypothesis does away with
_all_ fundamental formal differences between non-suffixed present and
aorist stems: they both include exactly parallel types. The ease with
which aorist subjunctives were converted into duratives is pretty
natural, just as, conversely, it's a natural thing to use the English
present continuous to refer to future events that are already planned or
certain to happen ("I'm leaving tomorrow", "I'm meeting him for lunch").
Piotr