How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :)

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl
Fri Mar 19 02:03:02 UTC 1999


"Vidhyanath Rao" <vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu> wrote:

>>Exactly, the fact that the imperative has the secondary (short)
>>endings shows that these were the unmarked, neutral ones.
>>Present (Non-past) = neutral + ``here and now''.  The forms
>>without the -i extension then become past forms (aorist or
>>imperfect) by default.  But the distinction was already in
>>Anatolian (-mi present vs. -m past).

>According studies of contemporary language, present vs non-present
>distinction is rare to non-existent (Comrie says the latter in his
>``Tense''). Zero past does not seem to occur among languages with forms
>restricted to past that is obligatory.

I don't know, maybe the -i originally marked something else
(imperfective?).  For PIE, all we can recover is that it marked
the present.  Compare Akkadian, where the unmarked form (iprus:
-C1 C2 V C3) was the simple past, versus marked perfective
[perfect] (ip-ta-ras: -C1 ta C2 V C3) and imperfective [durative]
(ipar-r-as: -C1 a C2C2 V C3) forms.

>It seems better to assume that SE
>marked only person and number and could indicate past only when implied
>by context or by inference. But then there must have been some way
>(particles?) of overtly marking past when needed. Now, there is some
>evidence for augment outside Gr.Arm.I-Ir (Rasmussen indicated some in a
>post to the previous incarnation of this list). It is possible that the
>augment disappeared as the past became overtly marked otherwise (we can
>see this in progress in Pali). It may even be that the augment was
>grammaticized independently in Gr. and I-Ir: I don't know if the
>patterns of Myc., Homer and Avestan have been fully explained.

>In fact the zero past vs marked non-past of Hittite seems quite unusual.
>(i.e., Hiittite has its weirdness :-) I am not well read on the role of
>sentence particles in Hittite. Do they have any role in this? [I
>remember some work arguing that -kan marked perfectivity.]

>>Some features that are unique to the "Indo-Greek" verbal system are:
>>- the perfect as a separate "aspect", besides present (impfv.)
>>and aorist (pfv.).

>This is precisely what I objected to in the first place. There is no
>morphologically marked aspect in Vedic or any stage of Sanskrit.

I'm not sure what you're saying here.  Vedic and Sanskrit have
categories called (using the Greek terminology) "imperfect",
"aorist" and "perfect", which are morphologically marked in
different ways (root/reduplicated/-i-/-sk-(cch)/nasal presents,
root/reduplicated/thematic/sigmatic aorists, reduplicated
perfects [with special personal endings]).  These three
categories are found in Greek and Sanskrit/Avestan, and only
there do we find all three categories (marked in almost exactly
the same ways).  The fact that the Vedic, Sanskrit and Avestan
imperfect, aorist and perfect are not used in the same way as the
corresponding Greek categories is interesting, underpublicized
and also needs to be explained, but doesn't in any way affect the
obvious close genetic connection between the two systems.  At the
PIE, or "Indo-Greek" level, the three categories can be described
conveniently as "aspects", since they are all "past" in terms of
tense.

>To put it bluntly: The usual morphological classification of Vedic verb
>forms found in grammar books has no syntactic justification, but is due
>to 19 c. prejudices. It is a serious methodological error to base
>syntactic comparisons on the mere names.

The comparison is based on the forms rather than the names.

>> In Hittite, the perfect is still simply the past tense of the stative
>> (hi) conjugation.

>There are examples of resultative > `present perfect' > (perfective)
>past. But ``past state'' > resultative? IMHO, it would be better to
>assume that Hittite extended its use of -i for present into the
>`stative' by analogy, while the rest of IE extended the stative into
>resultative with further evolution into (a kind of) past in individual
>languages at different times. [Looking at some old messages, I found
>that I have asked this before and you agreed that PIE `perfect' was
>tenseless. In that case, Hittie -hi is an innovation.]

The 1p. sg. thematic in -oH shows that a stative present was not
limited to Anatolian, although the addition of -i may have been
an Anatolian innovation.  In fact, the morphologically marked
form here seems to be the past, with -e suffix (*-H2-e, *-tH2-e,
*-0-e).

>>- the imperfect as a simple past tense of the present ((augment
>>+) present stem + secondary endings).

>What does `simple past tense of present' mean? If it means aspectually
>unmarked past, how does that indicate closer relationship with Greek?
>If it means ``present (imperfective) in the past'', the claim is wrong.
>And Armanian aorist has `eber' which is usually traced to `ebheret'.
>Slavic aorist and Baltic preterit also have forms which seem to be
>from present stem + secondary endings. so such a form is not
>just Gr-I-Ir.

The point is that neither the Armenian nor the Baltic and Slavic
*imperfect* are simply made from the present stem + secondary
endings.   Only Greek and Indo-Iranian make the imperfect that
way.

Slavic does have some root *aorists*.  The Armenian aorist, apart
from the 3rd.p.sg., cannot be derived from either root imperfects
or aorists.

>> Italic, Celtic and Albanian ... but their forms are best described
>> as s-preterites.

>So what is the difference between s-preterite and s-aorist?

Italic, Celtic and Albanian "preterites", as a category, are a
mix of aorist and perfect forms.  There is no difference between
Latin dixi (formally an s-aorist) and pependi (formally a
reduplicated perfect), etc.  There *is* a difference between pf.
nina:ya and aor. anais.i:t (and impf. anayat).

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



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