Re: [tied] The phonetic value of PIE *h3 and the 'drink' root.

On Wed, 24 Jul 2002 16:29:37 +0200 (MET DST), Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
<jer@...> wrote:

>On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>
>> [On the causative]
>> 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.
>
>I've got to hand it to you, Miguel: Even if this analysis may one day turn
>out to be impossible, it has a distinct touch of ingenuity. It is one of
>those suggestions every reconstructive linguist would be proud to have
>made.

Thanks. The lesson for me: never forget to mention all the logical
steps which led one to a certain conclusion (probably the hardest part
of writing about historical linguistics).

>> 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.
>
>Sure I'm grateful for this support. Yet, being the bastard I am, I am not
>too pleased with what you add to the theory. Especially, I just won't
>accept the statement that the prefix-turned-infix influenced the root
>vowel. In the basic types, the root vowel is gone because the (originally
>unaccented) root is in the zero-grade, and it is precisely the
>accumulation of asyllabic elements that caused the reductions observed, as
>-mn- to -m-/-n- and deletion of laryngeals. Thus the -o- IS the infix
>consonant itself in syllabified form. A uvular or pharyngeal spirant being
>vocalized as /o/ is not unheard-of.

That -o- IS the infix is of course entirely possible. But one of the
things that tipped the scales for me into going along with the
*R-prefix (I reserve judgement for now on the exact phonetic quality
of the item: *R stands for Rasmussen), was the behaviour of the
reduplicated aorist in Sanskrit, which generally shows long /i:/
(/u:/) in the reduplication and zero grade of the root, except where
the root begins with a consonant cluster, where we have short /i/
(/u/). This reminded me of the behaviour that you described for the
*R-infix (**bhRewg- > *bhug- vs. **mRen > *mon- // sRiSwep > *siswep-

> Skt. sis.vap- vs. bhRubhuH- > *bu:bhuH- > Skt. bu:bhuv-), except

that logically, with the reduplication, it is now the complexity of
the *beginning* rather than the *end* of the root syllable that makes
the difference. Now if, like me, one believes that *o < **a:, then
the parallel becomes even greater, to the point of exact similarity,
and the underlying phenomenon can be interpreted as lengthening (of
**a to **o: > *o in the case of the causative/*togah2, of *i to *i: in
the case of the R-aorists.

>> 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.
>
>The IE perfect does not contain the infixal -o-, for the perfect ablaut ó
>: zero depending on accent, which is quite different from the caus.
>*mon-éye-ti. The functional assessment is very difficult, for a number of
>reasons: What is half a causative morpheme supposed to mean?

In the two cases I mentioned above, we also have half a causative
(being the verb "to be"), and then another half. In Georgian-Zan, I
don't know what the other half (*-en-/*-in-) means. In Basque, the
old causative prefix era- (where e- is merely the verbal adjective
marker used as the citation form) is not productive any more, and
younger causatives are made with the suffix -erazi (Bizk. -erazo),
which is itself the causative of a verb now lost. Bizkaian uses the
suffix -eragin besides -erazo, which is transparently the causative of
the verb <egin> "to do, make". A Bizkaian causative XXX-e-ra-gin
(XXX-to be-make) or XXX-e-ra-zo (XXX-to be-make(?)) is then not
entirely unlike my analysis of the PIE causative as *R-XXX-éye-
(be(?)-XXX-make-).

>Note that the
>causative is formed with the infix vowel *and* a suffix. What would it
>mean if it produces verbal nouns when combined with a suffixed thematic
>vowel and is put in the collective, as in toga? It looks like it's forming
>adjectives (vìlna : *wól-no-s > Gk. oûlos 'woolly'), in which case the
>infix means very little, for the thematic vowel also has this force alone.
>Since it originally precedes the word, could it perhaps be a word in its
>own right, something like an article combining the adjective with its head
>noun? Of course the semanteme of "being" would also fit, by why would
>adjectives not always have that? The obligatory use in agent nouns
>(*bhor-ó-s, no type **bhr-ó-s) would then be like the n-stem form of the
>Germanic weak adjective. The basic difficulty is of course that the
>lexicalized remains have mostly survived only because they took a semantic
>turn and so were not obliterated when whatever they were originally
>designed to mean was replaced by new and productive derivatives. That
>means that most of the time the semantic shade is unoriginal.

That is often the problem.

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