Re: PIE meaning of the Germanic dental preterit

I am not going to intrude into this discussion except to say that I believe
Piotr is completely right to link -*to participles with Germanic dental
preterites.

Subsequently, the participial phrase was interpreted as finite; and personal
endings added.

Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 4:20 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] PIE meaning of the Germanic dental preterit


> On 2008-03-04 01:10, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
> >
> >
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com <mailto:cybalist%40yahoogroups.com>,
> > Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> > >
> > > On 2008-03-04 00:47, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
> > > ems that you have problems to remember well what I said
> > > >
> > > > I said that: ORIGINARY THERE WERE SPECIFIC VERBAL <VERB>-DHEH1
> > > > FORMATIONS IN PIE
> > > >
> > > > And that the number of such PIE formation arrived to be relevant
> > > > because some daughter languages (Germanic, Baltic, etc...) arrived
> > to
> > > > generalized this formations and to use them as an Morphological-
> > > > Pattern in order to construct new Verbal-Aspects.
> > >
> > > Ah, so you do believe that the Germanic weak preterite goes back to a
> > > PIE formation. I deny that, so we do disagree about something :)
> > >
> > > Piotr
> >
> >
> > Not to a specific one -> you like to quote me with what I never said :)
> > Is the third time that you try to do this...
> >
> > => it is a Germanic innovation that has generalized in a Verbal-Aspects
> > some existing PIE dHeh1-verbs...
>
> But that's precisely what I disagree with. The Germanic weak preterite
> does not continue _any_ PIE pattern, least of all any kind of
> Verb-*dHeh1- compound. Its form is too similar to that of the *-to-
> participle to be based on anything else. So the first part of the
> construction is not a bare verb stem but a PIE verbal adjective
> (functioning as the past participle). The whole thing looks for all the
> world like an original periphrastic tense, not a grammaticalised
> compound. Typologically, such "participle plus auxiliary" constructions
> are very common and have been created independently in numerous
> languages. Surely if Polish has a preterite continuing the univerbated
> Slavic neo-perfect (szedl/em 'I went' < *s^IdlU (j)esmI 'I am gone') and
> if coalescence of this type involving the verb 'be' is not unknown
> elsewhere (not to mention explicitly periphrastic comstructions like <I
> an gone> or <je suis allé>) -- it still doesn't follow that PIE had
> *h1es- verbs somehow reflected in the Slavic neo-perfect. (Not that the
> presence of *-h1es- cannot be suspected in some complex verb stems in
> PIE, esp. the desiderative, but that's an independent story.
>
> Piotr
>
>