[Lingtyp] “young” and “old” PERFECT

[Sergey Lyosov]

Dear colleagues,
  In the course of two-millennia recorded history of Akkadian (a long-extinct Semitic language),  PERFECT as a specific “tense” first showed up in the epoch of historical record, around 2000 BC. And around 1500 this conjugation “degenerated” into  SIMPLE PAST in independent narrative sentences, ousting the old (proto-Semitic) Preterit conjugation from this slot. Yet the older form of Preterit was preserved forever in wh-questions, negations, and relative clauses. This is as if in standard British English “He has written this paper” would have to be transformed of necessity into “the paper (that) he wrote,” but never into  “the paper (that) he has written,” etc. Do you know of any parallels for this kind of development or distribution?
  Thank you very much,
  Sergey        
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