On Sun, 21 Jul 2002 08:25:56 +0100, "P&G" <
petegray@...>
wrote:
>> >> [Miguel] The causative suffix is in origin the verb *ey-e-ti
>> >[JER:] But 'make; send' must be the verb corresponding to Gk. hí:e:mi,
>> >i.e. IE *H1yeH1-. ... Because it meets the semantics of Gk. hie:mi,
>med. hiemai >>exceedingly well. The middle voice iyattari 'marches' ir
>påractically identical with híetai 'is >>being sent, is marched off'.
>
>Pokorny takes Greek hiemai, hietai = "moves forward, hurries" from a
>different root, namely *wei/weie, which we might read as *weyH, page 1123.
>
>Otherwise, you're in good company with your assertion - even Szemerenyi
>agrees that it is possible!
It took me some time to figure out whether Szemerényi agrees that it's
possible that hiemai is from the same root as hie:mi or that
Szemerényi agrees that it's possible that iyami has something to do
with the causative. For all I know both assertions are true, but I do
find in Szemerényi (I'd overlooked that up to now):
"It is, however, not impossible that composition played a part in the
spread of this formation, ... especially in the case of factitives [=
causatives], with *yo- "make", for which we may refer to Hitt. iyami
"make, do"".
As for me, the reason for believing that *-ey{e/o} is in fact an
incorporated verb is as follows:
* In Sanskrit, -aya- alternates with -paya- as the iterative/causative
suffix, -paya being used after verbal stems ending in a laryngeal
(i.e. in a vowel, after the loss of laryngeals).
* If -aya- and -paya- are variants of the same entity, and if the -p-
is not a feature of the preceding verbal stem, then p- must be a
prefix.
* The only prefix I know in PIE of the shape p- is the preverb *pe(:)-
/ po-.
* Therefore, the entity *ey-{e/o} must a verb.
* The Hittite thematic verb iyami can be derived from *ey-{e/o}-mi,
and the semantics ("do, make") are impeccable.
Of course that is only half the story on the causative/iterative
formation. The other half involves the peculiar shape of the verbal
stem (o-grade or zero grade), for which, as Jens will perhaps be happy
to know, I now accept the solution advocated by him, i.e. an infix
(originally, and before *r- still so, a prefix) *R, which caused the
root vowel to shift to *o (in light roots) [in my view: lengthened the
root vowel], and caused laryngeal deletion if the root contained a
(final) laryngeal. The same element *R- plays a role in nominal
(thematic) formations of the type *togah2, *bhóros and *bhorós.
Until recently, I was reluctant to accept any of this, in part for
aesthetic reasons (not only do we have to introduce a new phoneme *R
but we also have to accept an "ugly" infix), but more importantly (as
I now see) for lack of justification of what the _meaning_ of this *R-
would have been.
I now have an idea about this, which I offer for Jens' consideration.
I realized that the formation of causatives sometimes (or often, for
all I know) involves the root of the verb "to be". Two cases known to
me are the Georgian-Zan causative prefix *ren-, *rin-, which contains
*r- "to be" (Klimov), or the Basque causative prefix e-ra-, which may
well contain the root *da "to be" (if from *e-da-). Without too much
effort, we can also imagine the copula being present in nominal
formations like **R-bher-os > *bhoros "which IS carried / which IS
carrying". Even the o-grade of the perfect/stative (*woid-e "he IS
(in a state of) knowing") may ultimately have the same origin, even
though the behaviour of that *o is not quite like the behaviour of *o
in the causatives and the aforementioned thematic formations.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...