USAGE: CHAT Hellenika (was: USAGE: Circumfixes)

On Tuesday, May 11, 2004, at 10:41 PM, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Ray Brown <ray.brown@F...> wrote:
[snip]
>> the -a- seems to have spread to other personal endings on the
> analogy of
>> the 1st person -a <-- /m=/.
>
> But the 1s perfect ending comes from *-h2a, with no trace of a
> nasal.  (I think the crucial evidence comes from Old Irish, with
> further but weak support from Latin 1s perfect -i:.)  Where does the
> 1s -a < *[m=] come in?  The aorist?
Yes - sorry, I was talking about the 'weak' or sigmatic aorist forms, not
the perfect tense.

> In the surviving athematic
> imperfects (as well as the thematic imprefects) we have 1s -n < *
> [m].
Yep - and -*sm > -sa.

> At least the vowel would have got some reinforcements from 2s
> *-th2a in the perfect.  That may have been quite popular at one
> time - it crops up outside the perfect in the form -stha in a few
> places in irregular Greek conjugation.
Yes - there was probably cross influencing going on all the time between
the weak aorist & the perfect endings.

>> The 3rd singular was -e and has remained so till the present.
>
> Which makes it difficult to see -a- as the _tense_ morpheme - but it
> is the clearest marker except in the 3s!
Yes - and the -a- did get extended by analogy in forms like 'e:lthas' "you
came" etc.  and this has continued, as you observed, so that in the modern
language we have -a- in in the imperfect except for 3s as well.

[snip]
> I meant, 'How plausible as a natlang would a conlang identical to
> Classical Greek be if we didn't know Greek?'.
Sorry - misunderstood you.

Dunno - but no one would be able to claim it was a engelang or loglang  -
it'd be about as arty as an artlang could be  ;)

Ray
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