?
The t-Form of the Sargonic Verb
The title of this paper refers back to Albrecht Goetze’s masterpiece “The t‑Form of the Old Babylonian Verb” (Goetze 1936), wherein he made a successful attempt to distinguish derivational meanings of the t‑infix (t‑stems) from inflectional ones, which came to be known as the t‑Perfect. The OB (and OA) t‑Perfect (i.e., iptaras) is a manifestation of perfect as a cross-linguistic grammatical value, alongside, e.g., the English Present Perfect or the Castilian Spanish Pretérito Perfecto. The t‑Perfect was not a Proto-Semitic inflectional verb form but emerged in Akkadian via upgrade (i.e., inflectionalization) of the derivational verbal t‑affix that existed in PS as a part of the inherited Afroasiatic patrimony. In other words, the Gt Preterite shape (iptaras) penetrated the G-stem paradigm as a new tense form, the t‑Perfect, while one of the meanings of the Gt-stem became the semantic source of the Akkadian t‑Perfect.