Future Passives categorized (correction)
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Dec 16 09:31:09 EST 2002
Peter, may I suggest that you delete the earlier correspondence that it not
directly relevant to what you're saying in your message, please. Anyone
really interested can review the earlier correspondence at the web site.
At 10:16 PM +1100 12/16/02, Peter Kirk wrote:
>Dear Carl,
>
>Thank you for clarifying your view of the "divine passive". I am
>learning from this!
>
>I'm sorry if I read the wrong paper, but I understood that this was the
>one recommended e.g. by Iver Larsen on 10 December as "Carl's paper
>which can be downloaded in pdf form from www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/Docs".
>The paper I found was the one relating to voice. Were Iver's
>instructions ambiguous, or incorrect?
Perhaps ambiguous. But you must have gotten VcCorr.pdf from my
artsci.wustl.edu site because I'd already removed it from the ioa.com site,
and I've now removed it from the artsci.wust.edu site also. The paper to
which Iver was referring is entitled "New Observations on Ancient Greek
Voice," and it can be read or downloaded at either of my mirror sites (but
note that "Docs" has upper-case D at the ioa.com site):
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/NewObsAncGrkVc.pdf
http://ww.ioa.com/~cwconrad/Docs/NewObsAncGrkVc.pdf
>As for the rest of my posting: First one correction, I should have
>written ELUQH not LUQH - 3rd person singular intended. I have rather
>limited linguistic training and a knowledge, varying from good to rather
>slight, of several relevant languages. But I am basing a lot of what I
>wrote on my own instincts rather than on others' studies. On the other
>hand, I am not very impressed by the studies I have seen, for example
>one which I found at your website from an Austrian author which starts
>with a demonstrable untruth, something like "All Indo-European languages
>are accusative languages". Has the author never heard of Baluch and many
>other Indo-Iranian languages which are well known to be ergative in the
>past tense? The limitations of such studies makes me very sceptical
>about what others have written on such subjects. One cannot reconstruct
>Indo-European from just Latin and Greek with a hint of Germanic.
Thanks for calling attention to that; I'll remove that from the site (in
fact, I don't think I've revised that page for several years; moreover, I
certainly don't endorse whatever may be found on a site to which I have
links.
>I didn't make up the idea that LUESAI is derived from something like
>LUEIS SE - or more accurately no doubt from a now lost archaic form of
>LUEIS SE. I remember learning this as more or less accepted truth. In
>fact this derivation could be very early, as a comparison of personal
>endings in such distantly related languages as Greek, Russian and
>Persian shows an astonishing stability in these endings. But if it
>actually went back to proto-IE I would expect to see it reflected in
>more IE languages.
I'd seen something like this, but certainly not as "a more or less accepted
truth." I would suggest you have a look at Sihler's book which I cited in
my last message and other listed in my "New Observations" document. What is
more clear from the evidence is that both the active and the middle-passive
endings show common pronominal elements for most persons and numbers:
MI MAI
SI SAI
TI TAI
MEN MEQA
TE SQE
NT NTAI
and secondary endings:
M MHN
S SO
T TO
MEN MEQA
TE SQE
NT NTO
>But what I wrote about past participles is indeed derived from my own
>observations rather than second hand from alleged authorities. You are
>of course right that -QEIS is -QE-NT-S, with the -NT clearly being an
>active participial ending of proto-IE origin (Latin -nt, German -nd,
>Persian -nd, English -ng). And none of the other languages combine the
>-d/-t passive participle ending with the -nd/-nt active participle
>ending. This observation requires some adjustments to my hypothesis. In
>fact I note that Greek, just like Latin and Russian, has adjectives
>ending in -t-os which are semantically equivalent to past passive (or
>intransitive active) participles. Some examples found from a quick
>dictionary search: AGAPHTOS, AKAQARTOS and many others with privative
>A(N)-, ARESTOS, GENNHTOS, GNWSTOS, GRAPTOS, DIDAKTOS, DUNATOS
>(intransitive active), etc etc; these adjectives seem to be the remains
>of a once general paradigm, and GRAPTOS is still recognisably close to
>its English cognate via proto-IE "(en)graved". So I would revise my
>hypothesis to suggest that for example EGENNHQH is derived from
>E-GENNHT(OS)-EI, GENNHQHSOMAI from GENNHT(OS)-ESOMAI. Of course we have
>to explain how -T-E- or -TOS-E- became -QH-. But the similarity does
>seem close enough for this hypothesis to be given serious consideration.
>But I agree that a close look at early Greek might provide relevant
>evidence.
I don't doubt that the Greek verbal adjectives in -TOS and the -T- seen in
older Latin verbal adjectives and emerging as the regular passive
participial additive are related to a PIE formative element. But I don't
think that has anything to do with the -Q- that appears in the Greek -QH-
formative element. Sihler, Meillet and Chantraine don't claim to know where
the -Q- originated, but do not its increasing use as an additive to
athematic "second" aorists with -H- stems (e.g. EBHN, ESTHN). Thus EFANHN
was originally simply an intransitive athematic second aorist of FAINW that
came to be used as an aorist MP corresponding to the active aorist EFHNA;
then in later Greek EFANQHN tends to supplant the older EFANHN.
>You will note that I have provided an explanation for the indeed
>remarkable fact that the aorist "passive" has active endings but the
>future "passive" has middle ones - they follow the analogous behaviour
>of the verb EIMI in the present and future.
And as I indicated in my previous message, I don't buy this, as I don't
think these were ever periphrastic forms based on participle + "to be"; at
any rate, I know of no evidence supporting such a theory.
And I agree with your
>parsing of ELUQHS but am interested in the derivation of the -QH-
>morpheme which you describe as "later emerging". Emerging from what? I
>would suggest from a periphrastic tense, which might be attested in
>early Greek inscriptions, but might not be e.g. because of origins in an
>unwritten dialect.
I think you will look in vain for such periphrastic forms in early Greek
inscriptions, even in Linear B (although my impression is that Linear B
documents tend to be inventory lists in which verb-forms aren't much
found). You should look at Sihler, and if you want, at Chantraine,
_Morphologie historique du grec_ (Paris: Klincksieck, 1961), pp. 165ff.,
§§185-192, "Aoristes intransitifs en -HN, -QHN." AND §4.0 of my "New
Observations," section entitled, "How the Theta-forms Probably Originated."
--
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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