पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/३५१

THE VERB 345 part of the perfect formation than was the augment of the aorist and imperfect. Its generalisation in Greek and Indo-Iranian is one of the many isoglosses that unite those two branches within the IE family. Even they preserve in vida ' knows ’ the older type of non-reduplicating perfect. Here, as elsewhere, Hittite shows greater divergence from the normal IE type. Hittite has no perfect, but a special type of present conjugation, the hi- conjugation, which has been compared with, and has certain features in common with, the normal IE perfect. At the same time the gap is not easy to bridge, since we have on the one hand a special tense with a sense of its own (state, result) which is made by most roots in addition to the present tense, and on the other hand a variant form of the present taken by certain roots. It is probable that in this matter Hittite is the major innovator, but it is not pos- sible simply to derive the Hitt, /h-conjugation from a system corresponding to the IE perfect, because there are outside Hittite also certain present formations which go with it : notably (i) Skt. formations of the type dduha enumerated above, (2) the Gk. conjugation of thematic verbs (A eyio, A iyeis., Aeyei). The perfect in Sanskrit and Greek conjugates in both active and middle. There is reason to believe that this is a secondary arrangement. In Sanskrit the middle endings of the perfect are in the main obvious imitations of the present, in marked con- trast to the active endings which differ so markedly from those of the present. Furthermore it has already been pointed out that an active perfect not infrequently corresponds to a middle present, and that the endings of the active are more closely related to certain middle endings than to other active endings. All these indications lead us to believe that the existence of two voices in the perfect is of later origin than in other parts of the verbal system. The evidence also points to the conclusion that the perfect did not to begin with have a corresponding preterite. Such forms of this kind as exist in several languages are to be classed as independent innovations. This applies both to Sanskrit and to Greek, and to a greater extent in the former, since while Greek did eventually develop a pluperfect with a meaning of its own, the forms classified as such in Sanskrit are in the main isolated and unstable formations which appear in the Vedic