Aspects of the Indo-European Aorist and Imperfect

Abstract

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) tense-aspect system has been reconstructed since the time of Delbrück (1897) as containing a fundamental opposition between two aspect-denoting stems: An Aorist stem, denoting perfective aspect, and a Present stem, denoting imperfective aspect. This reconstruction is, for practical reasons, based almost entirely on Greek and Vedic. Re-examining the Homeric and R̥gvedic data, I argue on semantic grounds against this century-old understanding of the tense-aspect system of PIE. In its place, I reconstruct the “Aorist” indicative as denoting perfect aspect (not perfective), and the “Imperfect” indicative as a simple past tense (not imperfective). Evidence for this reconstruction is based on the consistent usage in the R̥gveda of the Aorist in the meaning ‘have done X’ (with present reference) and the Imperfect in the meaning ‘did X’ (especially in narrative contexts)—a distribution which frequently has a precise match in Homer.