Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect?

[Steven A. Gustafson]

petegray wrote:

> I don't think we have to be quite that desparing - see my earlier posting.

Understood.  Of course, Palmer's book is older, and written at a time
when the laryngeal hypothesis had only newly been proposed; as such he
can't be strongly faulted for missing it.

>> Classical Latin is a highly artificial literary creation.

> I would have said "highly artificial selection".   It rejects some forms
> (both morphology and grammar) but these often remained in common speech, and
> have resurfaced in late Latin and become the norm in Romance:  e.g. dico
> quod (Plautus, Vulgate, and Romance).

I understand your point.  It has ever seemed to me that the founders of
the standard of CL made deliberate and even aesthetic choices guided by
euphony and the desire to seem august and weighty.  This suggests to me
that they gave the matter a fair amount of conscious thought; and
several passages in Cicero's Oratory seem to bear witness to this
consideration.

It was, of course, also a class-based standard; and because it helps
them perform their social function, a certain arbitrariness is
'desirable' in any such form of speech; cf. the irregular distribution
of the sound change /ae/ > /a/ before certain consonants in southern
British English.  Were it simply a matter of applying rules, many more
people could adapt to the standard, and its value for separating the
patricians from the plebeians would be lessened.

--

"Truth is the successful effort to think impersonally and
inhumanly."
             --- Robt. Musil, -The Man Without Qualities-