Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[petegray]

Stanley said:

>the non-present forms in Latin and Germanic (at least) are
> obviously heterogeneous in origin, on purely internal grounds.

I'm not so sure.

Proto-Germanic had a new formation for weak verbs, and in strong verbs the
pattern:
     present                 e grade
     preterite singular  o grade
     preterite plural      zero grade
     (and past participle zero grade, though that's not relevant here)

Later phonetic changes and analogical levelling have obscured the system
somewhat, and I admit there are problems, especially with class 6 verbs, but
I don't see that this is "obviously heterogeneous".   The system is based on
the IE pattern reflected in Greek and I-I perfect.  Even the
preterite-presents could all go back to the perfect, I think.

The Latin system does show different formations, but we come to it with
Indo-European eyes, and see in it traces of what we know from Greek and I-I.
In Greek and I-I we are happy to have different formations of the same
tense, without saying that they must originally have been different tense
systems, e.g. the reduplicated aorist, the -s- aorist, the root aorist.....
We can accept that there was more than one way of forming that tense.   This
is why I prefer to think of various morphological options in PIE, perhaps
with differences or nuances (as with all the various present formations),
and of course the tense structures we can recover even for PIE - but these
are not necessarily those of Greek and I-I.   These were combined into new
tense structures somewhat differently in different parts of the PIE world.

So it is a question of how we interpret Latin's "obviously heterogeneity" -
and I do not believe that on purely internal grounds Latin compels us to
believe that the different formations were different tenses with different
meanings.

(a) Latin overwhelmingly shows -s- on consonant stems, -ui/vi on vowel or
laryngeal stems.
(b) Relics of other formations are also to be found, e.g:
   (i) reduplication with zero grade.   Is this aorist (as it could be in
Sanskrit) or perfect singular generalised to the plural?   The only
difference in PIE would be the endings, a difference entirely lost in Latin.
If you say it is aorist, you say it is not a different tense system from the
Latin -s- forms;  if you say it is perfect, then you say it is different.
I think this is reading into Latin what we know from elsewhere, rather than
using "purely internal" arguments.
   (ii) long vowel, often from secondary origins (e.g. se:di from se-sd-ai
or la:vi from lav at vai), but not always secondary.   This is rare in Greek &
I-I, so often gets overlooked.  It is found in the Germanic class 6 verbs.
I don't think you want to claim that this is also a new tense system.   So
do we simply put it with the aorists, saying it's another form but not a new
tense?   On purely internal grounds in Latin, I don't think we can claim
anything.

Hope that helps clarify my reservations.

Peter