Middle and Passive Aorist and Future forms
Peter Kirk
prkirk at pmbx.net
Mon Dec 16 06:16:05 EST 2002
Well, first I would suggest that extant forms like EGRAFQH and
ANAPAUQHSONTAI result from secondary regularisation of the paradigms,
analogous to the similar phenomenon in English in which irregular verbs
often become regularised.
But in view of what I just wrote in another posting about -QH- forms
being derived from Greek adjectives in -TOS and forms of EIMI, I wonder
if we are seeing a reflection of other aspects of verb irregularity in
Indo-European. For example, the English "engrave" is now a weak verb
with past participle "engraved", but the archaic form "graven" (and the
cognate German "gegraben") bears witness to a strong verb "grave".
Perhaps much the same has happened to the Greek cognate GRAFW: it had
regular or weak (and very likely secondary) forms like GRAPTOS and hence
EGRAFQH, and irregular or strong forms like (CEIRO-)GRAFON and EGRAFH.
So this would mean that there was no lost theta, it was never actually
present in these verbs.
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Carl W. Conrad [mailto:cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu]
> Sent: 16 December 2002 01:02
> To: Peter Kirk
> Cc: Biblical Greek
> Subject: [b-greek] Re: Middle and Passive Aorist and Future forms
>
> At 4:37 PM +1100 12/15/02, Peter Kirk wrote:
> >Thank you, Paul. No, for some reason I didn't get a reply from you
> >earlier.
> >
> >In view of how the discussion is going, I think it is wise both to
check
> >how others (Friberg and Accordance - are these taggings actually
> >independent?) have tagged passive forms and to do our own searches
based
> >on surface forms. The next step should be a careful analysis of the
> >mismatches between these searches, as no doubt many of these
mismatches
> >are debatable forms.
> >
> >I think I suggested earlier that some future passives without theta
> >result from the loss of the theta for morphophonemic reasons, or to
put
> >it more simply because it sounds better. For example, I tended to
think
> >that EGRAFH was a contraction of EGRAFQH, even perhaps that
ANAPAHSONTAI
> >is a contraction of ANAPAUQHSONTAI. I realise that these are not
> >standard contractions. But is there in fact any mileage in this
> >argument?
>
> While I won't say it's wrong, I am really wondering what
morphophonemic
> reasons you can offer for the supposed loss of the theta. The
historians
> of
> Greek that I've read all seem to think that EGRAFH and ANAPA(F)HSONAI
are
> OLDER than EGRAFQH and ANAPAUQHSONTAI.
> --
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