Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Anthony Appleyard" <mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> wrote:

>  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".

Unlikely.  Meillet apparently suggested that -e^ax- derives from
the copula (j)es- cliticized to the verbal root (cf. the Latin
imperfect with *bhu-a:-).  But in view of the association of the
optative with the imperfect in Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian and
maybe Celtic, I would favour a derivation from the optative
*-oih1- > e^, followed by -ax- < *-eh2-s-.  In other words, a
"past optative".

>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.

The doubly thematic subjunctive is only Greek and Indo-Iranian, I
believe, and is in my opinion analogical.  The primary phenomenon
must have been a grammaticalization of the possibilty of
conjugating athematic verbs thematically, which we see in the
Latin future <ero:> "I will be".  Once the device was formalized
as a subjunctive, the logical next step was to thematize the
thematic conjugation, giving the Greek and Indo-Iranian doubly
thematic subjunctive (according to Beekes, these forms were still
disyllabic in Gatha Avestan).

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