Indo-European Historical Linguistics

Fortson Chapter 5 notes

This is a very important chapter, and exciting one. But it is also a huge data dump: much more than we can be expected to absorb and master right away. We will do what we can, work thru the exercises, and then have to flip back to this chapter again and again to find, understand, and apply various concepts.uu

• First, a slew of concepts having to do with verbs, some of which you may know from elsewhere:
• Subject, verb, and object
• Verbs with direct objects are called "transitive" verbs
• e.g. "I hit the wall" or "I love my dog."
• Verbs that don't/can't have direct objects are called "intransitive" verbs
• e.g. "I am descending." or "You swim?" or "It is raining."
• It just makes no sense to say "You swim something"
• You may say, "but I can say 'it's raining cats and dogs."
  
• But think about that: in that case, the cats and the dogs ARE the rain.
• In the case of transitive verbs, it's different, the wall is not the hitting and my dog is not the loving in the examples above.
• 'objects' like "cats and dogs" in "it's raining cats and dogs" or "race" in "I'm running a race" are not direct objects: I've seen them called "internal objects"
• Subjects are either first person (I, we) or second person (you) or third person (they, she, he, or it)
• Number: subjects are either singular, dual, or plural
• English has a few dual things, like pairs and couples, but no particularly dual verbs.
• PIE had a very prominent dual, as evidenced by the daughter languages that preserve it.
  
• Tense: this is often the same as time, but not always.
• In English, there are past tenses, present tenses, and future tenses.
• Once in a while, a 'tense' does not really refer to time
• Consider "What are you doing tomorrow?" to which I reply, "Tomorrow, I go to the store, then fly to Madrid." All those present tenses refer to the future.
• You can find instances of every tense not being the time it usually is.
• That often has to do with what is called "aspect"
• Aspect is a quality of verbs that indicates whether the action is ongoing/progressive/imperfect, completed/perfect, or one-time/aoristic.
• English speakers rarely if ever think of aspect.
• Voice:
  
• If the subject does the action, it is 'active' voice.
• If the subject has the action done to it, or undergoes the action, then it is 'passive' voice.
• Annoyingly for us, PIE had a 'middle' voice, which is pretty much impossibly to truly understand completely, but you need to deal with it. It is the same as the passive voice in most cases.
• Middle can be simply the same as active: the subject does the action
  
• Middle can mean that the action is reciprocal/reflexive as in "we fight each other"
• or it can be reflexive as in "I wash myself" or "I do this for myself"
• And the middle apparently filled the role of the passive in PIE: why not just call it "passive," then? Because it also has middle qualities.
  
• German, Russian, Latin, etc. students have a leg up here, because there are rough equivalents in those languages
• Some think there is also a "stative" voice, which reports a state, not an action being done (active) or an action being undergone (passive): 5:18
  
• Mood
• Verbs are 'indicative' if they have no reason to be another mood.
• The other moods:
• Imperative: when you give an order directly, as in "Get out of here" or "Decide now!" that is "imperative" mood
• Subjunctive:
  
• In PIE, this probably was basically a future tense
  
• In English and many daughter languages, certain actions that are usually somehow removed from reality are called 'subjunctive' mood: in English, think of "If I were a rich man" or "Be he man or be he beast, I'll grind his bones to make my feast."
• BUT these daughter-language subjunctives mostly came from the optative (see below).
  
• Optative: another mood, like the subjunctive, somehow removed from reality: think of "Would that I were a billionaire."
• Be careful: the PIE optative became different moods in different daughter languages (see P. 107 first full paragraph.
  
• Note that subjunctive and optative don't have "meanings" by themselves: in certain functions, they have certain meanings. First, one has to recognize the function, and then one uses that to know the meaning.
• Participles
• These are words formed from verbs that are BOTH verbal and adjectival
• Examples "the quickly running woman" or "the machine running the program"
• Note that they modify a noun (woman and machine) as adjectives do, but they can be modified by an adverb (quickly) or take an object (the program) as verbs do.
• They have tense and voice too, as verbs do. Sometimes that requires more than one word in English ("the woman, having been promoted, was elated": there, the participle is three words and is perfect tense and passive voice)
  
• Personal endings
• English says "I read" but "She reads"
• Well, in PIE and many daughter languages (including English's ancestor Old English), there were many many such endings, and they specified the subject, the tense, the mood, and the voice.
• One big division is between primary and secondary endings: basically, secondary endings are used mainly for past tenses.