Re: Go and come
From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, February 22, 2005, 7:03 |
On Monday, February 21, 2005, at 10:55 , Philip Newton wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 07:00:31 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> wrote:
>> The verb survives into modern Greek, but with only two stems:
>> /erx- /'present stem' with middle voice endings.
>> /erT- / 'aorist stem' with active voice endings.
>
> Perhaps more precisely, /erT- / ~ /elT- /, with the form with /r/
> being a more formal register and the one with /l/ more colloquial.
That really surprises me. The ancient Greek was /elth-/. One of the
features of demotic is that ancient /l/ between vowel & consonant tends to
be come /r/, e.g. /adelphos/ (brother) --> /aDerfos/. I would have assumed
/elT-/ was Katharevousa.
>
>> In modern Greek "go" is /p'jeno/ "I go"
>
> /pi'jeno/ (you seem to have dropped an /i/?)
Sorry - I did :=(
>
>> (no infinitive in M. Greek) with aorist /'pija/ "I went".
>
> Well, I'd say /'piGa/,
Well, it's certainly ['piGa].
> since |g| before back vowels is [G]. Though you
> could write it as /pigeno/, /piga/, since it's the same phoneme
> TTBOMK, but I wouldn't use /j/ as the symbol for that single phoneme.
Yep - both [G] and [j] are allophones of the same phoneme. One could write
it as /g/ as long you do not regard gamma-kappa as a single phoneme (as
some do).
>
> There's also /'pao/ for "to go". I'm not sure on what basis speakers
> select between /pa-/ and /pigen-/ in the present. The future is always
> /(Ta) 'pao/, though.
/pigen-/ indicative ~ /pa-/ subjunctive.
Sorry to have been a little less than thorough with the modern Greek stuff
- but it does not affect the main point of my mail:
Ancient greek - same verb for 'come' and 'go'
Modern Greek - two different verbs as in (I think) all western European
languages.
Ray
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