Momentary-Durative

[petegray]

Thank you for your long reply, Jens.   Firstly, I apologise for any offence
in the word "ideology".   I intended only to indicate what I see (rightly or
wrongly) as assumptions based on theories.

Now, going through your posting in detail:

>  is the common occurrence of a
> nasal-infix structure from *tewd- 'thrust' in Skt. tundate and Lat. tundo
> not part of our "data"?

Yes - but you have made the assumption that this root always shows the nasal
in the present.   This is not the case.
(a) Albanian shows two forms, one with, and one without the nasal.
(b) Old Irish shows no nasal.
(c) Greek a-tuzomai shows no nasal.
(d) If Pokorny is right to link the root with stud- then we have no nasal in
Latin studeo, nor in the various reflexes of it in Germanic.

>  There are so many instances of the _same_ verbal root turning up
> with a nasal present in IE branches that have nothing else in common ...

And there are very many instances of roots showing nasal presents in one IE
language, and not in another, or indeed appearing in both forms in the same
language, as Latin cumbo and cubo, or Greek leipo: and limpano:

>. Is it a coincidence
> that *k^lew- 'hear' forms a nasal present in Indo-Iranian and Celtic?

Yes.   It has no nasal in Greek or Latin or some others. (and so on with the
rest of your list)

I cannot agree with you that certain verbal rootts always had nasal presents
in all IE languages.   This is simply factually untrue.   But without that
assumption, your argument collapses.

>. Does that not indicate
> that the assigment of the nasal-infix structure as the present of certain
> roots was fully lexicalized in the protolanguage?

No, for the reasons just stated.   There are enough counter-examples to show
that whatever the conditions were for the "selection" of nasal, full grade
or suffixed present, they are now as unrecoverable as they are within Latin,
Greek, or Sanskrit, where very little difference of meaning can be
consistently shown.

> Oh no, it works only in the direction that a nasal present has a root
> aorist beside it in practically all cases.

Not a surprise, if you ignore all the langauges where this is not the case.
Likewise, not a surprise, since root aorists were an old form.   The same
could be said of full grade presents, or suffixed presents.   So the
statement really is without significant meaning.

> Also the reduplicated presents
> and the y-presents generally form root aorists.

Yes - so your argument (that a root aorist implies a nasal present) is
really rather weak.   Yet without this argument, you cannot derive tuda'ti
the way you do.

> [in] PIE, each verb had mostly picked one form for its present. The massive
> concord among the IE languages in this respect

There is no such concord.  Even a single language shows variety of
formations of the present, and the variety across the languages is
considerable.    But it would be good to have firm data on this - anyone got
three weeks to spare going through the text books?

> - while the even greater discord is easily
> explained by continued normal language change.

No.   Normal language change would not turn a nasal present into a
reduplicated one or vice versa, nor would it turn a -sk suffixed one into a
nasal present, etc, etc.

Peter