The 1ps pronoun *ego:... or is it *eg?

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 17050
Date: 2002-12-07

>Let me expand a bit more on this. As you can see, only Szemer�nyi
>reconstructs (non-laryngeal) *ego:, although he does not try to pass it off
>as the sole reconstruction for PIE, of course.

This is beside the point. Of course, different dialects of IE have
innovated differently on the 1ps. I'm aware of Indic being built
more on what seems to be *egHom... but so what? They are _dialectal_
forms (and thus to do with Post-IE, not IE).

Let me focus you back to IE itself being that you continuously go
astray. In IE, given the overall pattern and the semantics, the
pronoun is to be reconstructed as *ego:. In some dialects,
naturally *ego: (the only two-syllable pronominal stem) eroded to
a one-syllable stem *eg... but *eg is not IE by any means.

And naturally again, there was a general tendency for this erosion
to happen, so it occured independently in some dialects. (Just
because there is a common innovation doesn't necessarily mean that
it is to be reconstructed in the parent language.)


>A reconstruction, and I can see by your acc. **menem, gen. **menese that
>you're having some problems with the concept, [...]

Ever the fun-loving robot, young Miguel liked to alienate himself
from the rest of his playground peers by constantly dictating to
them his often idiosyncratic idealogies of right and wrong, only to
grow up denying he ever was misguided to have done such a thing,
for doing such a thing would be... well... um... wrong.

I know you like to [pr/t]each, but when you never accept that
you're wrong despite the overwhelming facts against you, because
of your own fundamental insecurity (being afraid of being wrong),
it doesn't make for a challenging or productive debate, does it?


- gLeN


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