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

From: Don Wilkins (don.wilkins@ucr.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 30 1997 - 19:58:12 EDT


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).

Don Wilkins
UC Riverside



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