Re: [tied] Re: PIE conjugations

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001 11:05:49 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>Hi, Miguel,
>
>Hope you enjoyed your stay in Poland.

Very much. On the linguistic front, I came back lugging Brückner's
old and two volumes of Ban'kowski's new Polish Etymological
Dictionary, plus a "Slownik polszczyzny potocznej".

>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.
>
>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

I assumed it in my table of "expected" Greek forms (as it would have
been the regular outcome of *-eti in Attic), but it's not necessary to
assume it all. The argument rests entirely on the transfer of *-s to
the 2nd p. sg. form (*-ei > -eis), and the subsequent analogy -es /
-eis :: -e / -XXX. The original shape of the 3sg. form is irrelevant
to the argument (which is not mine, BTW: one can find it in e.g.
Szemerényi and I suppose in not a few others).

>(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,
unlike deriving Grk. -eis from something like *-eth2a(i).

>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 in view of Luwian, I'd like to rephrase the chain to: *-omwi >
*-owi > *-owu > *-o:u > *-o:].

>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
losing an *-i in most of the alternative theories. At least the
*-o(:) itself is naturally explained, not analogical as in *-oh2[i].
I used to be a strong believer in some kind of laryngeal in the 1sg.
thematic, but I've lost the faith completely: the *o is wrong, the
loss of *i is inexplicable, and the *h2 is undemonstrable. The only
other possibility I can think of besides the one I gave (*-omwi >
*-o:[w]) is a derivation from the thematic conjunctive (**-o-om),
where you get the *o: for free, and the *i was never there. But you
have to lose the nasal, which is much easier to do (and attested in
Luwian!) within my preferred theory. Since the thematic conjunctive
is attested as *-o: everywhere, here too it seems preferrable to posit
original **-o-omw (> *-o:[w]) to account for that.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...