How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :)

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl> wrote:

> >What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede
> >and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made
> >from Indo-Greek present stem?

> The Armenian aorist e-ber is a "root aorist", the present stem is
> bere-.

I am not sure what you mean. Do you mean that eber is from *ebhert, or that
it is completely new formation without any parallels elsewhere in IE?

>...Slavic mino~ is analogical (vowel stems
> with -no~- presents always carry over the -no~- to the aorist and
> ptc.praes.act.).  Slavic vede is a Class IA verb, which does not
> distinguish present and aorist stems

Do you mean to imply that at some point in PIE to proto-Slavic, there was a
point at which present and past always had different stems, so that when we
see the same stem in present and aorist in Slavic, it must be an innovation?

> These forms may look identical to "Indo-Greek" imperfects, but
> only if we divorce them from their paradigms and the Armenian and
> Slavic verbal systems in which they are embedded.

When you see forms in IA which are formed the same way as imperfects would
be Greek, you consider to them to be imperfects with an imperfective value,
with no regard for the syntax. But for other languages, syntax matters? If
we use syntax as the guide, the so-called IA imperfect is the (narrative)
past, the ``aorist'' is the recent past and the perfect is the resultative
(at least in RV).

To put it bluntly, no argument which depends on the conventional names for
Sanskrit forms (and, I may add, names which were picked from Greek grammar
with no regard for the target language, and are, to be frank, based on 19th
c. prejudices) can be taken seriously. When I substitute the syntax based
names, I fail to follow the logic of the argument. And, I repeat, Vedic has
a marked past habitual, while in Iranian, optatives used as past habituals
are sometimes augmented, while the so-called imperfect is a simple past. How
come ignoring this is not divorcing the forms from the verbal system
considered as a whole. [Just because present with pura and/or sma or
augmented optatives are not mentioned in verbal paradigms of handbooks does
not eliminate the fact that they have a special syntactical niche.]

> >If you mean that these are aorist in Arm/Slavic, then aren't you
> >comparing apples and oranges here? If Vedic imperfect was not
> >imperfective, how can we compare it to Armenian, Slavic or Baltic
> >imperfects (the last of which is said to be past frequentative)?

> The point is that we *can't* compare it to the Armenian and
> Slavic imperfects, which are derived from the optative (probably)
> and from a sigmatic form (-e^ax-), respectively.  The unique
> feature of Greek and Indo-Iranian (and partially Baltic) is that
> they lack a marked imperfect form (special endings and/or special
> root extension), such as Italic, Celtic, Tocharian, Armenian,
> Slavic and Albanian have.  There is no strict formal distinction
> between aorist and imperfect, except for the abstraction of an
> "aorist" and a "present" root, to which secondary endings are
> added (and an augment is prefixed).

The marked imperfects are not similar enough to be traced back to a common
form. So they are all innovations. How does this support a common grouping
of Greek and I-Ir?

But I-Ir ``imperfect'' is syntactically not an imperfect and there is a
separate past habitual (present with pura: and/or sma in Vedic, optionally
augmented optative in Iranian). Given that past can be formed from any stem
in Hittite, this suggests that forms such as eber < ebheret are survivals,
from when such forms were simple past and became aorists when new
imperfective pasts arose (probably from past habituals if from optative,
from past continuative in Latin and Slavic?). Proto-Baltic would be
somewhere in between, with a new past continuative/frequentative (-dav),
with old pasts continuing pasts more often than elsewhere. [The limitation
of old pasts to imperfective due to the use of prefixed verbs for perfective
must be an innovation because there are exceptions to such a binary contrast
even today in Lith. and is handled differently in Latvian.]