Re: Augment revisited (was: NUN+Verb.Aorist)

Jonathan Robie (jwrobie@mindspring.com)
Wed, 30 Apr 1997 19:11:11 -0400

At 03:58 PM 4/30/97 -0800, Don Wilkins wrote:
>I thought I would take a momentary break from my programming (hopefully the
>next version of Prometheus will be ready in a few more days--and I can
>still use some more alpha/beta testers!) to jump back in on this
>discussion.
>
>At 3:33 PM 4/30/97, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>...
>>But there *are* aorists which do not have the augment, and some forms which
>>are used with and without the augment. So far, I haven't heard anybody argue
>>that aorist forms without the augment do not have past time referent, but
>>aorist forms with the augment do. Do you know if anyone would argue this
>>position? Would you? (Please? Pretty please? It would be kind of fun! ;->)
>....
>
>Jonathan, if you are referring to the absence of the augment in
>non-indicative moods, then of course we would say that such aorists
>inherently do not have reference to the past. As always, the problem is
>with the indicative. Do you have in mind some aor. ind's that do not have
>the augment? Offhand I can't think of any except those which are from the
>Homeric time period or are "missing" the augment due to purely
>morphological reasons (e.g. those verbs which begin with a long vowel).

But does anybody argue that aorists of the Homeric period which do not have
augments have different time properties than those which do have augments?

Jonathan

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Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie
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