Re: IE thematic presents and the origin of their thematic vowel

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, glen gordon <glengordon01@...>
wrote:

> >> So subjunctives correlate mostly with aorist stems
> >> in Tocharian, not presents? Did I get that right?
> >> I'll think about that some more.
> >
> > That's right.
>
> Still thinking <:/ Damn if that ain't a stumper. No
> gettin' around that one, I'm afraid. Well, I guess
> I'm just going to have to accept that non-derived
> duratives and aorists in MIE were both unmarked.

Modern English also does not make any formal distinctions between
root-duratives and root-aorists.

> The subjunctive would then be *-e-, but for the sake
> of my phonotactic scheme, I suppose I could still
> get away with a post-Anatolian subjunctive like
> *bHer-e-he-ti with intrusive *h1 (for your
> *bHer-e-e-ti). Hehe.
>
> Now, just to help me understand, what then is the
> original paradigm for stems like *bHer- again? Are
> we saying that *bHer-ti was originally the present
> and *bHer-t, the aorist/past? From where then are
> Narten stems coming from and how are they conjugated?
> Do they have a present in *Ce:C-ti and an aorist/past
> in *CeC-t?

The past tense would have been *bher-t and the non-past ("present")
tense *bher-t-i. Then the aorist would have been *bher-s-t. To me,
this belies an earlier paradigm without morphological tense
distinctions with the duratives, so there would only be a root-
durative *bher-t and a derived aorist *bher-s-t.

- Rob