Re: curious form in Philo

Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Fri, 7 Feb 1997 13:00:54 -0600

At 11:55 AM -0600 2/7/97, Jim Oxford wrote:
>I find myself in a state of being "morphologically challenged." Perhaps
>Carl or another classicist could help me with what I consider to be a
>curious form in Philo. In his Allegorical Interpretation of the Sacred
>Laws 1.12.39, Philo employs the form EPSUCHWTAI (from PSUCHOW). Is this
>form a perfect? How does one account for the lengthening of the omicron to
>omega before the -TAI ending?

Yes, this is pf. pass. 3 sg. There is nothing irregular about this form at
all: (1) All contract verbs lengthen the stem vowel (A --> H, E --> H, O
--> W) in all tense-stems outside the present, so here, principal parts:

PSUCHOW, PSUCHWSW, EPSUXWSA, EPSUCHWKA, EPSUCHWMAI, EPSUXWQHN

(2) When you have a double consonant like the Psi here, consisting of stop
+ S, you get an augment instead of reduplication.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/