Re: PIE -*C-presents

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:22:56 -0000, "tgpedersen"
<tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>> [mcv]
>> As I have mentioned before, I'm pretty sure it was also in
>> the 3pl. *-r.s, *-e:r < *-érs. It looks as if pre-PIE had
>> two distinct preterite formations, one with 3rd. person
>> marker *-t (most likely connected with the demonstrative
>> pronoun *to), one without it:
>>
>> 3sg. *-0-t and *-0
>> 3pl. *-én-t and *-én > *-ér
>>
>> The second form was later extended with a new 3rd.person
>> marker *-s (from the animate Nom.sg. of *to-, i.e. *so ?),
>> yielding:
>>
>> 3sg. *-0-t and *-0-s
>> 3pl. *-én-t and *-ér-s > *-é:r
>> (unstressed *-n.t and *-r.s)
>>
>> I agree with Burrows' suggestion above that herein lies the
>> origin of the s-aorist.
>>
>> Pre-PIE:
>> Pret. I Pret. II
>> *(h1e-)kWer-m *(h1e-)bher-m
>> *(h1e-)kWe:r-s *(h1e-)bhe:r-s
>> *(h1e-)kWer-t *(h1e-)bhe:r-s
>> *(h1e-)kWr-ént *(h1e-)bher-rs (~ bhré:r)
>>
>> Normalized to:
>>
>> root aorist s-aorist
>> *(h1e-)kWer-m *(h1e-)bhe:rs-m
>> *(h1e-)kWer-s *(h1e-)bhe:rs-s
>> *(h1e-)kWer-t *(h1e-)bhe:rs-t
>> *(h1e-)kWr-ént *(h1e-)bhe:rs-rs
>>
>> Yielding Sanskrit:
>>
>> ákaram ábha:rs.am
>> ákar ábha:r
>> ákar ábha:r
>> ákran ábha:rs.ur
>>
>>
>
>I think it can be done much simpler.
>
>The first thing to settle is to determine what kind of beast this 3rd
>person aorist is. Burrow provides a clue:
>p. 341
>"
>The Passive Aorist in -i
>There exists a passive aorist in -i, used only in the 3rd person
>singular, which is independent of any of the foregoing aorist stems :
>ájña:yi 'was known', ádars´i 'was seen', etc. Unaugmented forms (which
>appear in both indicative and injunctive use) are always accented on
>the root syllable : s´rá:vi, pá:di, etc. Roots having i, u, r. as
>medial vowel appear in the gun.a grade (aceti, ábodhi, asarji) ;
>elsewhere there is normally vr.ddhi (ága:mi, áka:ri, ásta:vi,
>as´ra:yi), more rarely gun.a (ajani, avadhi). The formation is taken
>by some 40 roots in the RV., to which others are added later. It
>appears also in Iranian (Av. sra:vi:, O. Pers. ada:riy = Skt. s´ra:vi,
>ádha:ri), but not elsewhere in Indo-European.
>Neglecting the augment, which was a secondary and optional addition to
>preterite formations in Indo-European, it is clear that these forms
>are nothing more than old neuter i-stems, without any termination,
>which have been adapted to the verbal conjugation.
>"

Since we have no non-Indo-Iranian data to go by, the origin
of this formation is far from clear. The ending -i can
indeed represent a neuter i-stem, but another possibility
would be *-h2 (or *-h1, *-h3). The root vocalism perhaps
favours Burrows' hypothesis: we seem to have PIE *o, rather
than lengthened grade caused *-H (*bhoudhi > bodhi, *kori >
ka:ri, *g^onh1i > jani).

>In other words, this 3rd sg aorist is a nominal form of the verb.
>
>The 3sg s-aorist in its original endingless form has the following
>characteristics: e-grade, vr.ddhi, s-suffix. In other words,
>morphologically it behaves as if it were a deverbal root noun in the
>nom., with Szerémenyi-lengthening. Semantically, the best I can come
>up with is that the subject must have been in the dative, something
>like: 'To-him, (there-exists-a) deed', for "he did".

The Sanskrit passive aorist is rather a different beast than
the s-aorist. For starters, it is passive. It is also
restricted to the third person. Burrows may be right that
it's in origin a nominal formation (neuter i-stems with
o-grade), because that is indeed what the forms look like.
The s-aorist forms (even in the third person) don't look
much like masculine root nouns in the nominative at all.
Root nouns rarely have e(:)-grade, and they always lose
nominative *-s after a resonant. Furthermore, the *-s in
the 3pl. is added to the verbal plural morpheme *-en >
*-(e)r, not to any nominal plural. If the precursor of the
s-aorist was ever a nominal form, it had already become a
purely verbal form by the time of PIE.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
miguelc@...