Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive

[Anthony Appleyard]

  Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl> wrote (Subject: Re: How weird is
Hittite? Not weird enough :)):-

> ... the Armenian and Slavic imperfects, which are derived from the optative
> (probably) and from a sigmatic form (-e^ax-), respectively. ...

  I suspect that the Common Slavonic imperfect with its characteristic vowel
hiatus {-a.axu} or {- at .axu} (`@' = the {yat'} vowel, it looks like a crossed
soft-sign, it may have been pronounced `ia' with the stress on the `i') is
derived from the sigmatic aorist {-axu} with the vowel at the end of the stem
pronounced with hesitation to indicate durativeness, e.g. "as I wro-ote" for
"as I was writing".

  I suspect also that the IE subjunctive may have arisen (as common IE evolved
from its ancestor) as the indicative pronounced with hesitation on the
thematic vowel for a similar expressive reason, until the hesitation became
phonemic and hardened into an interpolated glottal stop (i.e. the H1
laryngeal), which later disappeared with compensatory vowel lengthening.

  For long thematic vowel arising from H1, compare in Attic Greek what I call
the `subjunctivoid' conjugation, e.g. "I live" {zoo zeeis zeei zoomen zeete
zoosi}, and likewise {knoo} = "I scrape" and a few others (double vowel =
long), which I suspect arose from IE verbs ending in {-eH1e/o-}: gwjeH1e/o- <
root {gw-j-H1}.

  Greek grammars formally list these as contracted from {-aoo}, e.g. {zoo^} as
decontracted {zaoo}, but such a form with an `a' vowel would < IE root
{gw-j-H2}, which means "force, power" rather than {life}, and indeed I came
across an ancient Greek gloss somewhere that said that uncontracted {zaei}
meant {biinei^} (meaning as Latin `futuet') (< I.E. gwiH2-neje/o-)  Ionic
Greek (e.g. Homer) (more liable than Attic to the persistent bulldozer of
`Analogical Levelling' which often destroys amounts of a language's linguistic
`archaeology'), seems to regularize these verbs as usually {-eoo}, but
{zoo.oo} for {zoo>}.