Momentary-Durative

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Sun, 18 Jul 1999, petegray wrote:

>>>> [Jens:] Strunk has shown that nasal presents go with root aorists,

> Can you give us a reference please, Jens?   I would like to question this,
> for the following reasons:
> (a) In Greek it is largely true, but there are exceptions;   so a bald
> statement would need qualification.

It was never claimed for the individual languages, only for the common
reconstructed protolanguage (or even relatively recent prestage of it), so
"qualifications" are not a problem out of the ordinary.

> (b) In Latin it is largely untrue, since the aorists are either sigmatic or
> the rare reduplicative  aorist (tango tetigi, claimed by some as an aorist
> on the basis of Homer tetago:n, or the lengthened vowel: pango pe:gi (~
> perfect pepigi).   I can only find cumbo cubui which supports the claim in
> Latin.

You might also have thought of cerno:/cre:vi:, fundo:/fu:di:,
linquo:/li:qui:, rumpo:/ru:pi:, sino:/si:vi:, sperno:/spre:vi:,
sterno:/stra:vi:, vinco:/vi:ci:.

> (c) In Sanskrit there is a variety of possible presents and possible
> aorists.   There are 29 roots listed by Whitney which take nasal presents
> (ignoring the class nine presents).  Of these the first retains its nasal in
> the aorist, the second has no aorist, the third shows non-nasal present
> forms, and has either reduplicated or sigmatic aorist, and so on .....
> through the list.

What's wrong with yunakti/ayok, s'rnoti/as'rot, bhinadmi/bhet,
vrnakti/vark, and why ignore those of class nine (too good?) - ?

> (d) As stated earlier, a root may show nasal and non-nasal presents in
> different languages and even in the same language.

Yes, and where there is evidence about what is old and what is young, it
is a very general picture that the nasal present went with a root aorist.

> So as a bald statement I find it unbelievable.   The evidence doesn't seem
> to be there.

Much depends on how the statement is phrased - and about what language.

>    I would like to see what Strunk actually says.

Klaus Strunk wrote the book Nasalpra"sentien und Aoriste which appeared in
1967 at Winter, Heidelberg: Discounting refs. and index etc., it's just
about 100 pages of text that makes for quite easy reading. Strunk makes a
very strong case for the PIE paradigmatic companionship between nasal
presents and root aorists. It would be wrong to report this as a definite
rule, but Strunk does conclude at ''die paradigmatische Kombination beider
Sta"mme als ein uraltes vorhistorisches Pha"nom'' (p. 128). The book
treats verbs of the Indic classes V and IX (why did you exclude the
latter?), adding in a special chapter that VII seems to have worked the
same, but has not left such a clear picture. - From looking all through
IE, I have got the impression that an inherited nasal present is as the
general rule accompanied by a root aorist (or whatever became of root
aorists in a given branch - in Greek they often added -s-). The reverse is
not the case - and nobody ever claimed that: the root aorist is also the
normal aorist type for reduplicated presents, and very often also for
y-presents (which may have been back-formed to replace nasal or
reduplicated presents that fell out of use, or simply to create a present
stem where none existed before).

> [Jens:]

>> If my observation that there is an alliance between the sk^-present type
>> and the s-aorist is correct,

> Both forms may be used for some other reason, for example phonetic.   In
> both Greek and Latin the sk- ending occurs only after a vowel, which then
> takes a sigmatic aorist for purely phonetic reasons.

How do you mean? Do you consider the s-aorist morpheme a reduction of sk^?
Or even of *-sk^e/o-?? If so, by what rule?

>>> This brings me to a general question. There seem to be two camps about the
>>> category system of the PIE verb. One believes that the aorist-imperfect
>>> distinction, to be equated to perfective-imperfective distinction,
>>> ``always'' existed in PIE and Hittie lost this distinction, while Vedic
>>> changed things around. The other considers the aspectual distinction to
>>> postdate the separation of Anatolian.

>> [Jens] There are these two camps, yes, and I am in no doubt that camp one is
>> right. There is no way the specific forms of the aspect stems could have
>> been formed secondarily in "the rest of IE" left after the exodus of (or
>> from) the Anatolians. At the very least, all the _forms_ must be assigned
>> to a protolanguage from which also Anatolian is descended.

> I thoroughly agree with you here, Jens.   The forms are scattered over most
> of the IE languages.

>> [Jens:] And what would
>> the forms be there for, if the functions that go with them only developed
>> later?

> Here I disagree.   There can be variety of form in a language without a
> difference in meaning.   Look at German plurals (or English for that
> matter).   Sometimes a difference of meaning will emerge, fixing one meaning
> on one form and the other on the other (German Woerter and Worte, Dinger and
> Dinge), but this does not mean that all variations must necessarily
> correspond to a difference in function.    Language simply doesn't work that
> way, and there are far too many counter-examples for that claim to stand.

> Counter examples in English:
> (a) strong versus weak past tenses, e.g. dived ~ dove (origin historical /
> analogical)
> (b) plural /s/ versus plural /z/ (origin phonetic)
> (c) gentive versus preposition e.g. Tom's ~ of Tom (basis stylistic)
> (d) Time expressions (believe it or not, 10:45 really is the same as a
> quarter to eleven)
> and so on.

> I see the development of a functional difference as a later phenomenon, and
> I see it emerging differently in Sansksrit and Greek and Latin.

These are not counterexamples: All of the items you quote (except d) will
have to be very old - as types. And those of the types that are not
productive will have to be very old for the items quoted (goes for dove,
not for dived). In so far as the types can be shown not to be simple
variants of each other (as the two English sibilants), they must
originally belong to different categories. In fact, Eng. _of_ did once
mean something different from the relation expressed by the genitive. The
German plural variants used to belong to different stem classes - and
different stem classes used to have different derivative suffixes that
used to express different semantic shadings.

The last part completely escapes me: Are you anticipating that 10:45 and
"a quarter to eleven" will one day come to mean two different things? Is
THAT to you the only normal way language change works?

>   I suspect
> that some scholars are temporarily misled by the use of Greek names for the
> Sanskrit verbal system.

I plead not guilty, and I'll defend most of my colleagues who also know
that the terminology is misleading and only traditional anyway.

Are you in effect saying that IE morphology cannot be reconstructed? If
so, do you mean not at all, or just not beyond some specific limit which
you feel I have passed?

Jens