From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 5417
Date: 2001-01-11
>Hi, Miguel,Very much. On the linguistic front, I came back lugging Brückner's
>
>Hope you enjoyed your stay in Poland.
>I raised the problem of PIE conjugations in order to show that what even very safe-looking fragments of our PIE reconstruction may suddenly be found to stand in need of revaluation. What Adams does in the EIEC is certainly a little premature. A new type of present related -- as far as its inflections go -- to the traditional "perfect" and to the Hittite hi-presents has probably come to stay; but the revolutionary new look of the traditional thematic conjugation is not yet sufficiently established to be included in a book addressed not only to students of IE but to the general reader as well. I shall reserve my judgement on these new tendencies till the publication of Jasanoff's forthcoming book on PIE conjugations. It's not only the present but also the preterite system and the relation between the two that should be reconsidered.I assumed it in my table of "expected" Greek forms (as it would have
>
>Some of the complications can't be explained as easily as you propose. For example, to get from *-eti to Greek -ei you need to assume palatalisation to *-esi
>(one would expect Doric to preserve *-eti) and the analogical restructuring of the now-opaque ending (along with that of te 2sg.) to bring it in line with the aorist. If the proto-Greeks were so eager to level out present and preterite endings, why didn't they do something about the first person sg. (e.g. add a nasal to -o: as in Slavic or go the whole hog and replace the old ending with *-oin, parallel to past-tense -on)? Explanations that depend so heavily on analogy are difficult to constrain properly and must remain highly conjectural.Of course it's conjectural, but at least it's a real possibility,
>As for the 1sg. *-o:, the chain *-omwi > *-omwu > *-owu > *-o:u > *-o: is hardly preferable to *-o-h2, though the latter has its problems too. Even if one accepts your labialised /mw/ and the vowel modification it causes for the sake of the argument, the unmotivated loss of the nasal (who would have wished to remove the most transparent element of a 1sg. ending?)The Luwians (where we have 1sg. present -(a)wi). [On second thoughts,
>and the lack of tangible support for *-o:u make this derivation look somewhat fanciful.The total loss of *-u after *-o: is a problem, though not as great as