How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :)

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Vidhyanath Rao" <vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu> wrote:

>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl> wrote:

>> I don't know, maybe the -i originally marked something else
>> (imperfective?).  For PIE, all we can recover is that it marked
>> the present.  Compare Akkadian, where the unmarked form (iprus:
>> -C1 C2 V C3) was the simple past, versus marked perfective
>> [perfect] (ip-ta-ras: -C1 ta C2 V C3) and imperfective [durative]
>> (ipar-r-as: -C1 a C2C2 V C3) forms.

>I am completely ignorant of Akkadian. But it seems that the
>durative/imperfective can also be used in the past. Then the
>simple past may have been a perfective limited to the past

According to Lipin'ski it was a narrative simple past in
Akkadian.   It later became a perfective in West Semitic (which
form was in turn displaced by the old stative > perfective).

>What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede
>and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made
>from Indo-Greek present stem?

The Armenian aorist e-ber is a "root aorist", the present stem is
bere-.  In any case the endings of the Armenian aorist (and
imperfect) are completely unrelated to those of the "Indo-Greek"
aorist and imperfect.  Slavic mino~ is analogical (vowel stems
with -no~- presents always carry over the -no~- to the aorist and
ptc.praes.act.).  Slavic vede is a Class IA verb, which does not
distinguish present and aorist stems (unless ve^de^ was meant,
which is a perfect form, the only one surviving in Slavic).
These forms may look identical to "Indo-Greek" imperfects, but
only if we divorce them from their paradigms and the Armenian and
Slavic verbal systems in which they are embedded.

>If you mean that these are aorist in Arm/Slavic, then aren't you
>comparing apples and oranges here? If Vedic imperfect was not
>imperfective, how can we compare it to Armenian, Slavic or Baltic
>imperfects (the last of which is said to be past frequentative)?

The point is that we *can't* compare it to the Armenian and
Slavic imperfects, which are derived from the optative (probably)
and from a sigmatic form (-e^ax-), respectively.  The unique
feature of Greek and Indo-Iranian (and partially Baltic) is that
they lack a marked imperfect form (special endings and/or special
root extension), such as Italic, Celtic, Tocharian, Armenian,
Slavic and Albanian have.  There is no strict formal distinction
between aorist and imperfect, except for the abstraction of an
"aorist" and a "present" root, to which secondary endings are
added (and an augment is prefixed).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam