ego wrote:Look who's here! I was wondering if you're still alive man. How's life going?
I'm here.
Life's well, thanks for asking. I've been quite busy but the semester is almost over (πάω νομική σχολή εδώ στο Σαουβαδόχ, στη Βραζιλία) and I can't wait for my vacations.
How about you? You'll stop your studies στο Φιλολογικό να πας Λονδίνο;
ego wrote:About the topic now:
I think that verbs which are very common and they came directly from ancient Greek with no interruption, lost the internal augment. Those which were lost and re-introduced in the modern times, retain it, or better, haven't lost it, although the omission of the internal augment is a most common "mistake" by natives.
That's an interesting theory. But I'm not sure it plays off. :-/ Words like "απογράφω" (απέγραψα), "κατακλύζω" (κατέκλυσα), "παρασύρω" (παρέσυρα), "παρατάξω" (παρέταξα) - and so many others - seem to break that rule. I think it probably has to do with simple everyday usage. I might be quite far off here, but (because I agree with you that the internal augment is most likely fated to disappear) I could take a wild shot and say that this is a phenomenom that has already been happening for quite some time. And Katharevoussa maybe tried to prevent it by using rules for the augment, resulting in a fractionary pattern. Which would explain why so many words have both forms: κατατρώω (κατέφαγα, κατάφαγα), καταθέτω (κατέθεσα, κατάθεσα), παρασέρνω (παρέσυρα, παράσυρα - see "παρασύρω" above), παραδίδω (παρέδωσα, παράδωσα) etc. In other words, this commonly happens in many languages: while grammarians make efforts to establish a more sophisticated rule for a morphological pattern, certain forms are already fossilized to most of the common folk. Years later, prescriptive grammar itself tends to accept those common-folk rules as well - especially when consecrated authors use those forms on their literary works.
But this is a far shot, just a guess. I'm not an expert in Katharevoussa, and you'd know it better than me.
ego wrote:Which you think that will be the elements that will disappear in the near future?
Good question. Have you noticed how genitive plural tends to be misused in certain cases? If I wanna say "a few friends called me, I'm going over to their place", I'd say "πάω σπίτι τους" (and not "σπίτι των"). Funny, huh. Judging from how the ablative, when it ceased to exist, was split into the dative, genitive and accusative; and how the dative, when it ceased to exist, was split into genitive and accusative, my guess would be that the genitive might somehow die and be replaced by accusative and nominative. But for a change of such magnitude to take place... it would be a hell of a reform. Nominal declensions are much more difficult to disappear now than they ever were in the past. It's weird how Slavic languages still display 6 or 7 cases. Maybe Greek would lose a few endings, like the final -s in female words, for example, like you said. Apart from that... I can think of a few things that might be less complicated, but they're more like things foreigners would have trouble with. Natives wouldn't really incur in these mistakes/simplifications.
ἄνθρωπός ἐστι πνεῦμα καὶ σκιὰ μόνον.