Imperative – the oldest form of the verb? (by the material of the ket language)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of the status of the imperative in the archaic unwritten Ket language of the Yenisei group. Based on previous studies of this form of the verb in the Ket language, the author of the article approaches the analysis of the Ket imperative from a new perspective, from the point of view of the diachrony of its formation. The most ancient verbs are considered both in terms of semantics and the structure of the word form. The methodological basis of the work is the theory of contensive typology by G. A. Klimov. In the article, verbs that do not have personal subjective indicators are assigned to the class structure of the language: “to speak” 1SG nima, 2SG kuma, 3SGM bada, 3SGF mana – imperative: qan' guma! 'Tell!' (lit. let you say it!); "cut" ha:s'a 'I cut, saw, shear' – ha:l'a 'sawed, cut, sheared (I, you, he)' – imperative: ha:l 'a! ‘cut!’; "eat" s'i 'I eat, you eat, he eats' s'i:l'а 'I, you, he ate', imperative: s'il'a! 'eat!' Each syllable here is represented by a primary class-deictic particle with the structure C/V, where C represents the class, and V is the deixis, indicating the sphere of the speaker (nearest) -i-, interlocutor -u- and absent (remote ) – -a- having in the predicative meaning of this action, regardless of the time of its occurrence. The structure of the particle q-a-n' ‘let’ is interpreted as: indicator of the centrifugal version / causation, ascending to the class indicator of the addressee k/q/γ > uk/uq/uγ ‚you’; active action deixis -a-; action performance - indicator -n'. he following is an analysis of the structure of verbs with primary personal subjective indicators ascending to class-deictic particles in predicative use with syncretism of parts of speech. In general, five groups are presented, demonstrating the progress of the language from the class system to the nominative one through the stage of active typology. It is concluded that the primary verb form was the imperative.