Minus quam perfectum

Steve Gustafson stevegus at aye.net
Wed May 19 00:11:07 UTC 1999


As promised, what I have been able to glean about the origins of the Latin
perfect inflexions from books:

According to R. L. Palmer's -The Latin Language-, pp. 272-275, the Latin
perfect, since it was used as both perfect and aorist, "comprises stems drawn
from both these series of tense stems."  He proposes no rule to tell which ones
will be picked.

"The type of perfect most characteristic of Latin, that in -vi, is not found
elsewhere."  He does observe that it is probably ancient, in that it often
exhibits a different ablaut grade from the present stem, giving -sero-, -se:vi-
as his example.  He believes that it came originally from the aorist of *bhu,
*bhuei > *fu(v)ei, and that this -vei spread by analogy to whole classes of
vowel-stem verbs.

As to the origin of the distinctive personal endings, Palmer says:

1sg -i = the middle ending -e from Sanskrit and Slavonic, representing -ai
or -Hai;

2sg -isti = the element -is-, which Palmer thinks is the same ending you see
in the -eram and -issem groups, + IE -tha, plus the -i from 1sg, > -is-thai >
-isti

3sg. -it, with -t brought over from the primary inflections

3pl -erunt again has this -is suffix, plus -unt > -ont from the primary.  He
relates the archaic alternative -ere to the -r endings of the passive.

Beekes, p. 239, by contrast, simply observes: "Latin has added -i to all its
singular endings and the 3pl.  In 2sg. and pl. the -is- is unclear."

My comment: all of these explanations look pretty ad-hoc to me.

---
With wind we blowen; with wind we lassun;
With weopinge we comen; with weopinge we passun.
With steringe we beginnen; with steringe we enden;
With drede we dwellen; with drede we wenden.
                                  ---- Anon, Lambeth Ms. no. 306



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