Re: [tied] Fw: Subjunctive

----- Original Message -----

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, December 31, 2006 9:50 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Fw: Subjunctive

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 happened
to acquire a resultative ("perfect") significance; in other words --
that the perfect has been characterized by reduplication ever since it
arose as a grammatical category.

Piotr

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I would be much more inclined to see this reduplication as an expression of the perfective aspect.

 

Patrick

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