On 2006-07-20 14:09, raonath wrote:
> I remember reading that the tudati type is occurs much more frequently
> as injunctives in RV, rather than with primary endings. That would
> suggest that (1) tudati was a replacement for tudat as the
> injunctive went out of use and (2) this type may have gotten started
> (as injunctives/aorists) even in PIE times.
>
> But, (2) needs to be tempered by the fact root forms being
> thematized in avidat/tudati type was still going on in Sanskrit.
> [My gut feeling is that this was to avoid clusters of stops,
> which were drastically simplified in the MIA stage.]
Your reservation is of course well justified, though the fact that the
<tudáti> type occur even in Anatolian suggests that the process began
very early. In general, the division line between durative or iterative
root meanings ("presents") and punctual or telic ones ("aorists") is by
no means solid and can be crossed both ways. The same general meaning
may easily acquire nuances of either kind. There's something
fundamentally arbitrary about the fact that e.g. *gWHen- 'strike, kill'
is formally a root present while *kWer- 'make' is formally a root
aorist: the aspect of a root with a given meaning may be quite
unpredictable. The injunctive is one of the natural neutralisation
points for the present/aorist contrast, since forms like *gWHen-t or
*kWer-t carry no overt aspect markers. Also augmented imperfects like
*é-gWHen-t are formally isomorphic with augmented aorists like
*é-kWer-t, both being marked for tense but not for aspect.
Oxytone presents are often associated with root aorists. Perhaps it was
the semantics of the middle voice that favoured the shift of aspect:
aor.inj. *gWerh3-t 'swallows, eats (sth.) up' (punctual), mid. *gWr.h3-é
'is engaged in devouring, feeds himself', hence a "neo-thematic"
impf.inj.act. *gWr.h3-é-t and pres. *gWr.h3-é-ti 'is devouring'. This
could have happened at any time as long as the categories in question
still existed. In a few cases (like *wid-é-t) the new thematic form
retained the aorist function of its ancestral verb.
Piotr