On 2006-12-31 17:26, Patrick Ryan wrote:
> Because 1 comes before 2; simple before complex. It is the universe
> we live in. Sorry about that.
With this logic, the earliest humans must have been one-legged and
one-eyed. Of course there was a time when our ancestors were
unicellular, but that was a long time before they evolved into anything
humanlike. I see nothing absurd in the hypothesis that reduplicated
structures of the type *bHe-bHor- had existed well before they happeneed
to acquire a resultative ("perfect") significance; in other words --
that the perfect has been characterised by reduplication ever since it
arose as a grammatical category.
Piotr