Momentary-Durative

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Patrick C. Ryan <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

> Lehmann does not consider C'CV per se perfective: he contrasts an aorist
> vida{'}t as +perfective, + momentary, and the perfect ve{'}da as
> +perfective, -momentary.

> You may or may not agree.

Isn't perfective supposed to mean that the duration, if any, of the event is
being ignored? I did not understand this +perf, -momentary (or +duration)
business when I first heard it and I still do not.

> But to attempt to address the idea behind your question if I understand
> it, the relative rarity of thematic aorists may be substantially
> attributable to  the fact that there were two other competing aorists
> (or equivalents): the root aorists and s-aorists.

But s-aorists are generally considered to be a late formation too. So what
kind of aorists did all the roots with root presents form, before there were
thematic or s-aorists?

> Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the
> athematic and thematic aorists? And what might that difference (if any)
> have been?

I am not sure that there was an unified ``aorist'' in PIE. If I have to take
a position other than ignorance, it will be that the different stem
formations were not yet fully grammaticialzied. To try to find such
differences of meaning will be as futile as trying to find a pattern in the
changes in meaning brought about by ``prepositions'' in phrasal verbs in
English. For example,
*winedti (>vindati in Sans) must have meant ``is searching out'', *widet
meant ``found'' while ``woida'' meant ``knows''. It is not clear to me that
*(e)winedt meant >only< ``was searching out'' and never ``searched out'' (as
avindat does in Sans). And without such a conclusion, perfective as a
category does not make sense.