--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <G&P@...> wrote:
>
> >> [Piotr:] In the languages that have preserved the perfect as a
fully
> >> independent grammatical category
> >> (Greek, Vedic) reduplication is obligatory, *woid- being the sole
> >> exception.
>
> >[Sean:] What about Greek ephthitai as the perfect of 'decay'?
>
> (a) There are other examples of non-reduplicated perfects in Greek,
e.g.:
> erxatai = are shut in < *werg-, pluperfect erxato, and with
augment
> eerxato
> heimai = I am clothed with < *wes-mai, 2nd p.sing hes-so,
pluperfect
> hesso, hestai; participle heimenos < *wes-menos
> amphi-akhuia crying around (not < amphi-*wiagh, but from
amphi-wakh)
> dekhatai await pluperfect edegme:n, participle degmenos
> (The examples are in Monro)
>
> (b) How could we tell the difference between an inherited obligatory
> reduplication and independent regularisation of reduplication in
languages
> that show it?
>
> (c) Why discount the evidence of Latin, where no -o- stem perfect shows
> reduplication?
>
What I imagine, very sketchily, is an early situation with regard to
verb stems something like this:
PPIE *CaC- -> PIE *CeC-, normal neutral stem
PPIE *a-CaC- -> PIE *iCoC- -> *CoC-,
indicating singularity of action
PPIE *Ca-CaC -> PIE *CeCC-,
indicating plurality of action, ie multiple subjects, repetition
(and similarly with root vowels i and u, obviously)
This means that the perfect *would* have had a singular with
reduplication; actually it would have had two forms
*CoC- and *CeCC-, the latter being iterative -> durative, intensive.
Now obviously you can't expect people to keep this in mind,
especially with an expanding language with many new speakers,
so the system collapsed into the now familiar forms.
This also explains why tenses that were formed from the
perfect seemingly were formed from the perfect plural.
Other than that, I think like Jasonoff that there were a
mi- and and a hi-conjugation, but, unlike him, I think
the mi-conjugation was originally non-finite forms of a
dependent construction, ie nominal verb-forms like a participle
or verbal noun. Abondolo notes that growing importance
of dependent clauses over the traditional dependent non-finite
constructions in Finno-Ugric languages, due to the influence
of Russian (and notes that when a language changes type under
the influence of a dominant language, it will import the new
function words, in this case specifically conjunctions,
from that language), and Saul Levin similarly claims that
dependent clauses in Indo-European is an import from the Semitic
languages. This is why the secondary endings occur in those
moods and tenses that are 'dependent' in nature, while the
primary ones, formed from the secondary ones by adding
locative -i, thus making up the well-known "progressive tense
by verbal noun in the locative" construction, gradually
out-competed the old hi-conjugation in the main clauses.
Now if this the case, the fact that the perfect and the middle
have the same endings (namely the old finite ones) becomes a
result of shared retention, not of something semantically relevant.
Torsten