[tied] Re: PIE Punctual and Durative

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> On 2007-01-01 14:52, raonath wrote:
>
> > This claim has always bothered me, as is the related claim that
> > the aorist shows more irregularities than the present. This is
> > patently false for Sanskrit where the most irregularities are
> > seen in the root present, which far outnumber root aorists.
>
> As for PIE, Meier-Brügger's statistics, based on the LIV data, should
> perhaps be taken with a small grain of salt, but nevertheless he finds
> the following numbers of reconstructible PIE verb stems in each of the
> relevant types:
>
> ordinary root presents: 139 (102 "Fälle sicher")
> acrostatic (Narten) root presents: 46 (31)
> root aorists: 392 (265)
>
> The two subtypes of root presents counted together are significaltly
> less numerous than e.g. nasal presents or *-éje/o- causative/iterative
> stems, not to mention the *bHéreti type and presents in general. By
> contrast, root aorists account for ca. 67%-78% of all aorists (and the
> sigmatic type accounts for most of the rest).

But there is a problem in estimating the % of root presents: Except
for Anatolian and Indo-Iranian, there are only a handful of root
presents found elsewhere. Any verb attested only in the other
branches might have been switched to other present classes.
For example, if the Vedas and Panini had not been preserved,
but the IA record had begun with Pali/Asoka, we would figure that
there were only a handful of root presents in IA; it gets even worse
in Parkrits: except for reflexes of *Hes, there are no root
presents; most others get switched to -a- or -e- (< *-eje/o-).
How do we get around this problem?

Nath Rao