Momentary-Durative

[Vidhyanath Rao]

One thing I failed to note was that Peter is calling *bheret a root form (I
call it class I or strong thematic class) while to me only *gh'ent is a root
form. Some of the confusion is due to this misunderstanding.

petegray <petegray at btinternet.com> wrote:
> No present, and we call the past form an aorist.   When there is a
> present, we call it an imperfect.

I know, and it hides an important problem: Without native speakers to guide
us, we don't know if a given root form (and to some extent reduplicated
forms) is really an aorist. In RV, at least, the syntactic distinction
between imperfects and aorists has puzzled people (Elizerenkova claims that
the difference was still developing, and Gonda accepted it, while at the
same time believing that there was an aspectual difference! Watkins
attributes the fuzziness to mainly the root present/aorist.)

> The full grade is already a marker of something, even if it is conditioned
> by presence of the accent.   I was wanting to distinguish the handful of
> presents which were simply the bare root, from those that carried this or
> any other marker of the present.

There are 40 roots, after eliminating the kars.i type and the s'ete/s'aye
types, in RV and Brahmanas that use the bare root. [Since root presents
disappear rather quickly in MIA, and their occurance in Classical Sans
depends greatly on genre, and obviously new roots use either -aya- or in
case of those that look like borrowing from Drav/Munda we see
only -a- or -aya-, we must add the remaining roots of Panini's II class to
this, which will bring the total to about 60.] Hittite has about 60, I
think, and percentagewise, this is more than Sanskrit. This is more than a
handful.

> Greek uses the perfect for the present state which results from a previous
> action.  Tethne:ka ("I have died") actually means the present state, "I am
> dead".    In some parts of Sanskrit literature, it is the aorist which
> carries this meaning, not the perfect.  Elsewhere aorist and perfect are
> in practice indistinguishable, and the perfect drops out of use.

Which parts of Sans lit? Please be specific concerning times, genres etc.

---

There is an important point when it comes to discussing the diachronic
syntax of Sanskrit, namely Sanskrit is distinguished from MIA primarily by
phonology, and ``good Sanskrit'', as opposed to ``hybrid Sanskrit'', by
morphology. However, all varieties of Sanskrit from the time of Asvaghosa
(~1 c. CE) show Prakrit influence in syntax. This varies both over time and
genre. For example, Kavya lit uses mostly finite verbs in past tense, while
drama dialog, like Prakrits, uses only the PPP (in -ta). However, Prakrits
have only one way of referring to the past and this influence led to the
imperfect, aorist, perfect and PPP being used interchangably as all of them
would be translated into Prakrit the same way. Still, Kavyas, most of which
deal with mythical/legendary themes use the perfect much of the time while
the occassional exception such as Dasakumaracarita purpoting to contain fist
person narratives use imperfect and aorist in such places. Epics and fables
fall in between, with the parts usually considered to be latter using the
different forms more interchangably.

However, when we look at the older lit, whether the older upanishads or
Pali, show a very different picture. In upanishads, aorist is used for
recent past, perfect for narration of legends/myths while resultatives are
consistantly expressed with the PPP. In Pali, the perfect has disappeared,
but aorist and imperfect fell together into a preterite, and PPP is used
form a resultative. But PPP based forms occur much more in direct speech.
Interestingly, in the parts of Ramayana considered to be older, direct
speech uses PPP virtually exclusively.

I don't see any parts of Sans lit in which aorist has resultative meaning.
Nor does perfect die out in Sans, only in Pali.

The difference between aorist and perfect in RV is hard to pin down, but it
is a jump to conclude that it did not exist. Such a conclusion is reached by
appealing to variants now with aorist, now with perfect. But how do we know
that the intended meaning was always the same? For pragmatic reasons, recent
(relative to the time of reference) events and events with persisting
results overlap. For example, Tamil has a resultative with auxillary iru and
a ``completive'' with auxillary vid.u. Depending on where the emphasis is,
either one is possible in many cases. I very much doubt that non-native
speakers can find the difference by studying 2000 pages worth of novels. But
the meaning conveyed is different and it is definitely wrong to conclude
that they are equivalent.

Based on variants, we can conclude (and some do) that moods did not have
distinct meanings. Now, in English, ``Go'', ``You may go'', ``You can go'',
``You will go'' can all be used for issuing orders. Does that mean that they
are all interchangeable?

Regards
-Nath