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

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Vidhyanath Rao" <rao.3 at osu.edu> wrote:

>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.

Still, the unmarked form is a simple past, while the marked forms
are the imperfective ("durative", "present-future") with
geminated C2, and the perfect (CtCC [iptaras], with infix -t-).
Such a system is potentially very close to one with unmarked past
vs. marked present (all it takes is the loss of the perfect).

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