Root aorists vs. marked presents

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen <jer at cphling.dk> wrote:
> I agree that the stem formants are originally derivational, so
> polymorphism was original. But original does not necessarily mean PIE,
> it  may apply to times much older than that. By the time of the
> protolanguage it appears that most verbs had lexicalized one particular
> present-stem formation and one particular aorist formation for any
> given verb. I do not exclude the survival of separate derivative sets
> from the same root or even the existence of competing synonymous
> present or aorist formations with the same verb, but I do not like the
> general principle to be simply "anything goes", for it is truly
> impressive how much falls into place in a very neat way if we insist
> on rigor here too.

I am not sure what `rigor' means here. If it means excluding forms or
trying to explain them away when they do not fit into the theory, then it
has a serious drawback: this process has a positive feedback: More data we
exclude, the stronger the theory seems and we feel more secure in using
weaker arguments to exclude even more. The only corrective I can see is to
step back once in a while and look at alternate theories.

[There are some strange classifications in Sanskrit for which the only
reason seems to be reduce polymorphism: For example, da's'ama:na is
sometimes called a `participle of thematic aorist' in spite of the accent.
Reduplicated forms, like acikitat, are assigned to the (plu) perfect in
spite of the fact the stem has a thematic vowel, or ju'jos.asi against the
accent. I find it hard to call these things `rigor'.]

>    Incidentally, I cannot accept the statement, "Of course, only Indic
> and Hittite matter for root presents", for Hittite does not distinguish
> present and aorist stems, while some of the other groups do: We know
> from Greek, as from Indic, that *H1ei-mi is indeed a present, while
> Hitt. u-iz-zi 'comes' could in principle be an analogical formation made
> to a root aorist, had the question not been decided by the other
> branches.

The number of root presents outside Hittite and Indo-Iranian is quite
small. Is it a mere accident that two of the earliest attested corpora
(only Myc is in the same category and we don't really know its syntax)
have the largest number of root presents? Given that we see root presents
replaced by other, productive, forms (eimi itself was latter shifted to a
future in Greek) are we realy justified in assuming that root presents in
Hittite or Sanskrit must be secondary whenever the theory dictates it?

> Thus, I am not at all sure that *<gwh>e'n-t (Ved. ipf. a'-han, Hitt.
> prt. kuent) was the injunctive of a present stem and not that of an
> aorist. If Anatolian cannot show such things, and Indo-Iranian shows
> occasional shifts from one aspect stem to the other (e.g., Ved. de'hmi,
> le'hmi using the original aorist stem), then *<gwh>en(H)- could
> probably easily have been an aorist, as its drastic meaning of
> achievement may seem to imply. But this is just a thought on a detail.

Strangely enough I agree with this halfway. I see -i of primary endings as
originally denoting progressive (by which I mean that the reference time
is indicated to be in the >interior< of the event time; that this implies
the event has a non-zero duration is a mathematical consequence and is not
the defining property). However, forms such as *<gwh>ent were not excluded
from performative (this should be uncontroversial), habitual and generic
usages (note that both Greek and Vedic allow aorist stems to co-occur with
adverbs denoting indefinite repetition and it is hard to escape the
feeling that some of these examples denote habituality). Other changes in
Indic and Hittite led to the use of hanti/kuenti in these cases. But
before this happened, it would not be correct to assume that the `aorist'
was limited to the perfective domain.