Middle and Passive Aorist and Future forms
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Dec 16 08:49:21 EST 2002
At 10:16 PM +1100 12/16/02, Peter Kirk wrote:
>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.
That, I think, makes much more sense.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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