How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :)

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Vidhyanath Rao" <vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu> wrote:

>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?

Nobody knows where the Armenian aorist comes from:

  ber-i
  ber-er
e-ber
  ber-ak`
  ber-eyk`
  ber-in

It's certainly not simply *-om, *-es, *-et, *-omes, *-etes,
*-ent/*-ont, which is why I objected to pulling one form out of
the paradigm, and comparing that to a Greek imperfect.

>>...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?

No.  All IE languages that distinguish a present stem from an
_aorist_ (not past) stem have I think some verbs where the
distinction is not made.  Verbs like vesti (ved-) can make
root-aorists, but also s-aorists (two kinds of them):

I        IIa       IIb
vedU     ve^sU     vedoxU
vede     vede      vede
vede     vede      vede
vedomU   ve^somU   vedoxomU
vedete   ve^ste    vedoste
vedo~    ve^se~    vedos^e~

(the present and imperfect are:

vedo~      vede^axU
vedes^i    vede^as^e
vedetU     vede^as^e
vedemU     vede^axomU
vedete     vede^as^ete, -e^aste
vedo~tU    vede^axo~ )


>> 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?

I didn't mention syntax.  I didn't object to comparing Armenian
and Slavic aorists with Greek imperfects because they are
aorists.

>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?

You're right, it doesn't.  Shared archaism.

>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?).

That's true, but there is more.  You forget that imperfective
*presents* and perfective *pasts* also arose.  Hittite has only a
present and a past tense (in -mi, -hi and mediopassive flavours),
but it can also make a durative/iterative/distributive (present
or past) form from any verb, by affixing -sk-.  In non-Anatolian
IE, -sk- is usually one of the imperfective suffixes, along with
-i-, -n-, -neu- and a few others.  Most non-Anatolian IE
languages (except Germanic, Tocharian and maybe Armenian) also
have a specific perfective marker *-s-.  The dichotomy between
present (imperfective) and aorist (perfective) stems grew out of
the addition of both kinds of markers to verbal roots.  But the
marking was never complete, and there remained many root-presents
and root-aorists.

Greek and Indo-Iranian can make both presents and pasts from
roots suffixed with "imperfective" markers.  Forms like Skt.
gacchati / agacchat (*gwm-sk-e-ti, *e-gwm-sk-e-t), whatever their
synchronic syntactic function or meaning, are historically
iteratives, i.e. imperfective Aktionsart.  What's the problem?

One problem is that root-presents and root-aorists, which are
both direct cousins of the Hittite simple past (mi-conjugation),
get classified in different categories.

Another problem is that the habitual/imperfective *past* was felt
not to be marked enough formally or began to lose its
imperfective meaning, which is why new formations were created
such as the Slavic imperfect with -e^ax-, the Armenian and
Tocharian (and, if I understand you correctly, Iranian) imperfect
from the optative, the Latin periphrastic imperfect with
*bhu-(?).  And the Vedic past habitual.

If what you're saying is that a Vedic/Skt. "imperfect" like
<avahat> "he carried", without specific imperfective markers,
goes back to a simple past tense as in Hittite or indeed Germanic
[except for the augment, of course], I fully agree.  But the
question is, what happened to the meaning of that form when
s-aorists like <ava:ks.i:t> arose?  Did it become an
imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian)
like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless
narrative past?  And if the latter, what about marked
"imperfects" like <agacchat>?

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam