Salmoneus wrote: ↑01 Sep 2021 00:15
I can't give you an exact example, but it certainly seems plausible to me. Look at English, and the way the periphrastic present has supplanted the the simple present in almost all contexts. We could easily imagine it going further and relegating the simple only to the habitual aspect, which it's not all that far from now. So it wouldn't seem less plausible to me to have the simple past relegated only to the perfect.
Thanks - that makes sense.
A further question...
Euphratic initially is similar to other Anatolian in that only one main participle form is productive, let's say this was PIE's *ent/*ont, reflected as -at, with the meaning of "attained state". This is fine for active verbs, where it can just attach to the stem without a problem:
ar- 'to arrive'
arat 'having arrived' (arats-issim | 'having.arived–I.am')
However, the problem comes with middle verbs.
-at can't attach directly to the stem, as this would make the middle participle form identical to the active form, since the middle endings are all finite. (Other IE Langs seem to have used a wider variety of participle-type suffixes, but I'd rather Euphratic remain with only one in line with Anatolian.)
It seems there are a few options to generate a new middle participle:
a) The ending simply gets attached to (one of) the middle-voice finite stems:
Active: ippim 'I take'; apat 'having.taken'
Middle: apqa 'I take(for myself), I decide'; apqat 'having.decided'. (Otherwise it would just be 'apat' as above).
b) Some sort of construction where a deverbal/nominalizing suffix like *-wr gains a participle like function.
c) A participle-form of another verb is attached but then only applied to middle verbs.
d) (open to suggestions)
I'm not sure which/if any of these are plausible, and which might be the more likely route.
a) has the advantage that middle forms by Euphratic are no longer transparently derived from their active counterparts, and are largely lexicalized, so analogy of the root in the finite forms could happen. However, applying a participle-suffix to a "new" finite forms strikes me as something that doesn't really happen in IE?
b) This could work, but I'm least sure of this, and the route it would actually take.
c) This strikes me as quite characteristic of IE for finite forms, so perhaps could also work. Maybe a verb such as "become" which is already kind of semantically middle would work? The only problem might then be that the participle would almost never be predictable based on the finite forms...which isn't necessarily a problem as I suppose languages can tolerate large amounts of irregularity.
Anyway, any comments/advice/suggestions on any of the above would be very welcome!