Read rather "If, O Indra, I owned as much as you, I would indeed wish to be generous to the singer." Similarly, in I.129.6d-g the optative sequence ajeta ...
395-402: I find myself in disagreement with Dahl's temporal and/or pragmatic interpretation of nearly every instance of the perfect optative discussed in these pages.
First, a systematic comparison of the usage of the desiderative with the uses of the moods that might seem partially to overlap it, namely the subjunctive and the
optative. Although he mentions possible functional similarity with the subjunctive tangentially (pp.
I am not entirely convinced that the [Mi.sup.[subset]]raj angels' command to Bistami--"Come!"--is meant as a play on the
optative [ta.sup.[subset]]ala for God (pp.
Neither of these terms ("factual" and "notional") are adequately defined, and no further mention is made of the rather ambiguous term "notional." Furthermore, the term "factual" is applied to the perfect, despite its uses in conditional and
optative contexts (exemplified on pp.
70-71, where the
optative of the protasis is "angelehnt" on the apodosis; p.
Major non-indicative forms are the Imperative (7), the
Optative and the Irrealis conditional (8).
Ethics go back to what is esteemed good "and would be rooted in desire, in wishes." It is an
optative of the genre: "Oh!
After pointing out certain distributional anomalies (-is-, -sis-, and reduplicated aorists are generally prevented from forming an imperative differentiated from the injunctive; verbs like da 'give', dhd 'place', stha 'stand', and ga 'go' cannot differentiate injunctive and imperative in the second person singular of the root aorist; the imperative and injunctive do not contrast in negative clauses, where only the injunctive occurs), Baum goes on to discuss the functional distinction between imperative and
optative in second-and third-person contexts and finds some tendency for the
optative to be used for requests for tangible objects, while the imperative tends to signal hopes and wishes for intangibles.
