Augment (was Re: German ge- ptcpl cognates?)

[Vidhyanath Rao]

I remember a post from J. E. Rasmussen in a previous incarnation of this
list arguing that the augment has left traces outside Greek, Armenian
and Indo-Iranian. I don't remember the details and though I think that I
archived the message, I can't find it.

> In Greek only the sigmatic aorist has an augment (grápho - égrapsa),
> not the asigmatic one (e.g. mod. Grk. vrisko - vrika [was: eureka]),
> while the latter is probably older, like the 'strong' verbs in Germanic.
> I once heard that the augment was basically prosodic, because the
> -sa ending didn't allow a stressed syllable preceding it.
> Is the Indic mechanism similar?

Is the lack of augment in asigmatic aorist absolute in Homeric/Attic
Greek? I remember reading that there is a strong correlation in Homer,
but not absolute. On in RV are unaugmented forms found. Hoffman
(Injunctive im Veda) showed that unaugmented forms were tenseless.
Post-RV Sanskrit does not have unaugmented forms except in prohibitions.
So the Indic mechanism is not similar.

---

There is an interesting typological problem here. According to Bybee et
al (The evolution of grammar), unmarked past vs marked present is
unknown in extant languages. This makes the usual classification of
forms in Hittite (and PIE) quite unusual. I remember asking about this
before. Miguel suggested Akkadian as another such example, quoting
Lipinski to argue that iprus was preterite, iparras was present. But in
`Outline', Lipinski explicitely assigns iparras to imperfective (putting
present-future in quotation marks). So the anamoly still unexplained.