From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 53824
Date: 2008-02-20
>Searching through Burrows 'The Sanskrit Language' I found this on theAs I have mentioned before, I'm pretty sure it was also in
>origin of the s-aorist:
>"
>The s-aorist and the other forms of sigmatic aorist are sharply
>distinguished from the other classes of aorist in that there are no
>present-imperfect stems formed in the same way. There are indeed in
>the Veda certain isolated forms of the present made in this way
>(stus.é, his.e, kr.s.e) as well as some anomalous formations
>containing s which cannot be referred to the s-aorist stem (1 arcase,
>r.ñjase, 2 gr.n.i:sé, puni:sé) but these have the appearance of being
>tentative formations which never developed very far rather than relics
>of an earlier system.
>The s-aorist is found in Greek (ézeuksa, édeiksa, etc.) and Slavonic
>(ve^sU, sluchU, etc.). In Latin s-aorist forms have coalesced with
>perfect forms to make one tense (perf. di:xi:, du:xi:, etc.). In
>Irish injunctive and subjunctive forms of the s-aorist are retained
>(the s-subjunctive). No trace of it appears in Germanic. Radical
>vr.ddhi is attested for the vowel e by Latin and Slavonic (Lat.
>ve:xi:, O. Sl. ve^sU : Skt. áva:ks.am from vah-); for roots in
>diphthongs there is no clear evidence. In Hittite there is no s-aorist
>any more than any other kind of aorist, but there are certain
>preterite forms in the 2 and 3 singular which have final -š : 2 sg.
>da-a-aš 'you took', tarna-a-š 'you put in', da-iš 'you placed', pa-iš
>'you gave' ; 3 sg. da-a-aš 'he took', da-a-iš 'he placed', ag-ga-aš
>'he died', etc. These forms consist of the verbal stem enlarged by the
>suffix -s and have no personal ending proper, and beside them there
>are forms to which the personal terminations have been secondarily
>added: 2 sg. da-iš-ta beside da-iš, 3 sg. na-iš-ta 'lead' beside
>na-i-iš. These forms are compared to the s-aorist of other IE
>languages, but it seems unlikely that they are simply remains of a
>fully developed IE s-aorist system. In the first place we have seen
>reason to believe that the aorist in general has arisen by
>specialisation out of an undifferentiated preterite, and in this
>respect Hittite should represent an earlier state of affairs.
>Furthermore there is some agreement between Hittite and Tocharian on
>this point, since the latter language has also a certain type of
>preterite using an s-stem in the 3 sg.: A. präkäs, B. preksa 'he
>asked', and this coincidence does not seem to be fortuitous. Bearing
>these considerations in mind we may perhaps rather explain the IE
>s-aorist to be a post-Hittite formation based on the extension to the
>whole paradigm of an s-suffix which was originally restricted to the
>preterite of certain persons (notably the 3 sg.) of one class of verbs.
>"
>
>This seems to anticipate Jasanoff's idea that the s-aorist originates
>in the 3sg, to which it is still limited in Tocharian and Hittite.