This has all been said before, but where is the evidence that the thematic
conjugation was once transitive as opposed to an intransitive athematic
counterpart? Would such evidence not be common knowledge by now if it were
really true? I suspect the "evidence" is only in the structural analysis
of some non-IE languages. The irrelevance should be evident.

I guess the problem has been like this: Some languages mark the object
role in the transitive verbal forms. IE has a funny thematic vowel of
unclear function, what was it originally? Hey, couldn't it have been an
object marker? No, it could not, for we know what it was - it was a marker
of syntactic subordination ("subjunctive").

Jens

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Rob H wrote:

> In my "reconstruction" of the PIE verb system,
> "transitive" means the verb has a definite direct
> object and is so marked.  "Intransitive" means the
> verb does not have a definite direct object.  The
> direct object marker is reconstructed as the anaphoric
> pronoun stem e-, and is suffixed to the verb stem.
> Thus:
>
> bher-me "I bear"
> bher-te "you bear"
>
> bher-e-m(e) "I bear it"
> bher-e-t(e) "you bear it"
>
> The PIE stative is an entirely different paradigm.  It
> was used for when a given state was achieved.
> Although it was re-analyzed as a "perfect" conjugation
> in the daughter languages, it originally did not
> convey a perfective aspect (Sihler).
>
> - Rob
>
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