From: Rob
Message: 39889
Date: 2005-09-07
> glen gordon wrote:As I understand it, you are exactly right, Piotr. It is a shame that
>
> > 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!Could not *gWrxW-é- and *tud-é- simply be subjunctives of 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 andI completely agree that there were no formal differences between root
> 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*bher- is a root durative, is it not?
> 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").