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

[Vidhyanath Rao]

"Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

I am confused by some of these. I will appreciate some expansion.

> Formally, the Akkadian stative corresponds to the West Semitic
> perfective (and the Egyptian so-called "old perfective") and the
> Akkadian preterite corresponds to the West Semitic imperfective.
> ...  A plausible case could be made for iprus and iparras once
> having been the same form with the outcomes being the result of
> differences in stress.  If so, then the 'old perfective' became the
> stative and simply dropped out of the tense system

If I understand this correctly, the evolution seems decidely odd:
Perfective becomes a stative (existence of a state of indeterminate
duration would seem to be in the domain of imperfective) while the
imperfective became the narrative past but some other form was often
used for `durative' past. [OTOH, stative -> perfect -> perfective is a
more familiar chain.].
What are the reasons for this reversal of functions?

BTW, isn't the `imperfective' used with wa- in Biblical Hebrew for
narration? I know that people have been arguing for over 100 years about
the explanation, but I thought that nowadays this was taken to be a
survival of an old preterite and comparable to the Akkadian use. What is
the preferred explanation these days?