Oh no, I'm having another episode (age sucks, and then it gets worse)!
When I had my one-year course of Russian many years back, I was
puzzled why the formal present of perfective stems was future.
Then I had some courses in formal, also temporal, logic and was
puzzled no more.
It's like this:
Imagine one had to design a database system, ie the types
of sentences, sets of sentences etc, that was needed to
describe chess matches.
Among other things, you would need a stative-intransitive
verb Is-At(subj:<piece>, at:<position>) and a punctual
process-verb
Move(subj:<player>, obj:<piece>, from:<position>, to:<position>).
Details: in order to describe a sequence of moves, we would
have to extend the relation (the verb) with some arguments, like
this:
Move(subj:<player>,
obj:<piece>,
from:<position>,
to:<position>
before:set of <move>'s
after:<move>
).
Then we'd have to define board positions as a tuple
BP(positions: set of Is-At's,
before:set of BP's
after: BP
).
Etc.
Now suppose we stand outside of the description of a chess
game, with our own clock ticking along. There is very little
likelyhood that it shows exactly the time at which one of
the moves occur (this because Move's are defined as punctual).
As a matter of fact, because the events described are punctual,
and one's own time is a point, too, they will either be
happening at a point in the future or have already happened at
a time in the past.
Back to linguistics:
This means that a suffix that changes a stative or durative
verb to make it denote something punctual, will by that same
act make it denote something punctual in the past *or* in the
future.
Which means that the -s- of the s-aorist might be identical to
the Baltic future in -s-, if we define the primary function of
that suffix as that of making the verb denote something punctual
(we might have to give up the link to the desiderative, though).
What do you guys think?
Torsten