Minus quam perfectum

Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen jer at cphling.dk
Wed May 26 00:16:14 UTC 1999


On Sun, 23 May 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> One can compare Skt. laryngeal verbs in -a:u, but also the
> Tocharian B 1st p. sg. in -wa.  Albanian also has a category of
> aorists with formant -v- (origin?).

The Albanian type punova 'I worked' is formed from a stem punou- (whence
the endingless 3sg used with the refl. particle, u punua 'was worked').
The diphthongization is regular in the old participle, Tosk pun-uar from
*-o-nV (-o- from *-a:-, Lat. 1st conj., cf. loanwords like ke"rko-
'seek'). The sequence *-onV gave *-oune"/*-oure" (with flapped nasal?)
with a diphthong that later gave Old Geg uo, now ue, Tosk ua. The stage
*-oun/re" was resegmented as *-ou-n/re", and *-ou- was introduced
before the productive endings of the aorist, 1sg *-ou-a, 2sg *-ou-e which
gave -ova, -ove. A different reanalysis as *-o-un/re" gave rise to the
ptc. type hap-ur 'opened'.

Jens



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