Re: [tied] Re: PIE conjugations

On Fri, 12 Jan 2001 20:56:32 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>>But *-wan(i)/*-wen(i) are themselves undoubtedly connected to non-Anatolian *-men (and both in turn, one would expect, connected to singular *-m(i)/*-w(i)). The correspondences are irregular, but to me that suggests that we're dealing with an unstable proto-phoneme **mw.
>
>... or -weni dissimilated to -meni after -u- (similarly to -war/-mar).

That it certainly did: it's a Hittite soundlaw, and also occurs in
cases like <idalamus> (< *<idalawus>), acc.pl. of <idalu->, where the
<w> is not associated with <m> in any way. There is no need for
*-meni in Pre-Hittite.

>But Hittite has only -mi in the 1sg.

While Luwian has only -wi. "Undoubtedly" Hitt. -mi and Luw. -wi share
a common origin. I don't think a solution that explains Luw. -wi as
analogical after the 1pl. *-wani is very plausible (according to all
the sources I have at hand, *-wani is not even attested in Luwian):
one would sooner expect the singular form to influence the plural one.
A hypothetical scenario (for which I have no evidence whatsoever)
would be that Proto-Anatolian had *-mi after a consonant (say, *esmi),
*-wi (or nasalized *w~i) after a vowel (say, *eyaw[~]i), which were
ausgeglichen in different directions in Luwian-Lydian and
Hittite-[Palaic?].

>"Undoubtedly" is not the right word here, as many linguists connect 1pl. -we- with the non-Anatolian dual ending. Not my favourite theory, but let's leave a little room for doubt ;).

I forgot to mention the dual ending, which is likely to be a secondary
grammaticalization of the *-we- allomorph. It shows that forms with
*w also occurred outside of Anatolian.

>>There is awimi "I come".
>
>I know. There are several "explanations" of this particular -mi, cited by Szemerényi, for example. The problem with Luwian is that the attestation of anything is so often scarce and encumbered by philological problems.

The -mi seems to be of dissimilatory origin here, although it's funny
that it would mimic the Hittite (and general PIE) ending. Similar to
-umeni in Hittite.

>>What are Hittite verbs like iiami, iasi "to do" or zinnami, zinnisi "to stop" if not thematic verbs?
>
>What I mean is that there's no inflectional contrast between vocalic and consonantal stems. This can be interpreted in various ways -- the usual "retention or innovation?" dilemma.

Indeed. In this case I prefer the retention scenario, with Luwian
-(a)wi one step towards non-Anatolian PIE *-o: [and Ly{c|d}ian(*) -u].

(*) Silvia Luraghi says Lydian, I.M. Dunaevskaya says Lycian, and I
don't have the time to look it up.

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