[tied] Re: IE thematic presents and the origin of their thematic vo

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "nathrao" <nathrao@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Rob" <magwich78@...> wrote:
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "nathrao" <nathrao@...> wrote:
>
> > The marker is the "past tense" -ed ending. "Carried" seems to
> > imply punctuality; "carries/is carrying" do not.
>
> So what is 'punctuality'? Does it mean some interval of time
> (could be years in extent) conceived of as a blob, or does it
> mean 'a very short duration of time'?

The former, I think. It means that the action, however long or short
it took, is over, and is considered as a whole (a single "point", in
effect).

> > > This gets even harder when PIE supposedly used iterative of
> > > 'take a step' to say 'walk', or the iterative of 'take a sip' to
> > > say 'drink'. How did they say 'I walked home' or 'He drank the
> > > whole pot of mead'?
> >
> > Probably through derived aorists, since iteratives are by nature
> > durative.
>
> What was the form of this derived aorist in PIE? I thought that
> you had just root and sigmatic forms.

The sigmatic form is derived; that is what I meant.

> > You're talking about the augmentless "past tense" forms, right?
> > I agree with Sihler in that there is nothing inherently past-
> > tense about them; on the surface, they are simply unmarked for
> > anything besides person and number. I say "on the surface"
> > because these forms tend to have zero-grade of the root (e.g. Gk.
> > _lípon_ vs. _élipon_), which means they must have been accented
> > on the ultimate syllable. So the Greek forms cited came from IE
> > *likWóm and *?é likWóm, respectively. Furthermore, IIRC these
> > forms are usually not sentence- or clause-final, so we can safely
> > say that they are in the subjunctive mood. I take this as
> > evidence for IE to have had the following ancient rules governing
> > its verbs:
>
> 'elipon' type is supposed to be secondary, a replacement for the
> root aorist. root aorist and root 'imperfects' are indistinguishable
> morphologically, with difference claimed to be soley due to
> whether 'true present' (to be interpreted as progressive, as no
> known language combines progressives and states, with habitual
> and generic left out of that group) is semantically possible.

Well, what do you think would cause it to replace the root aorist?

> In Vedic both the augmented and augmentless thematic aorists
> occur as main verbs. I am not sure about Homer. How do we decide
> (without getting into a vicious circle) as to which is original?

The behavior of the augment shows that it was still a preverb in IE:
in Greek prefixed verbs, the augment is between the prefix and the
verb root/stem. So I would say that the augmentless forms are more
original.

> > 1. There was only one finite (or, at least, indicative) verb per
> > sentence or independent clause.
> > 2. Any verb in a dependent clause was in a non-finite (or, at
> > least, irrealis) form.
> >
> > These rules are extremely common in left-branching/head-final
> > languages. One that immediately springs to mind is Japanese,
> > where the main verb is generally sentence-final and any other
> > verb is in a "conjunct form" employing the ending _-te_.
>
> Some of the universals asserted for left-branching languages
> turned out to be areal (limited Eurasian left-branching l.),
> rather than be true universals. I am not sure about the above
> claim.

I did not say that they were universals, just very common. :)

- Rob