From: tgpedersen
Message: 17070
Date: 2002-12-09
>*ego:)? That
> Piotr:
> >Does it occur anywhere apart from Gk. ego:(n) and Lat. ego (<
> >hardly counts as "much, much more common" than anything.How about this: *ego: is from Austronesian *aku, or indirectly
>
> The pronoun quite obviously comes out of nowhere. We have an
> accusative *me which, if correlating with *twe/*te, means that
> we should have found **mu: in the nominative as we find *tu:.
> Instead we find this *eg(o:/om) item that has clearly been
> tacked onto a paradigm already dominated by an *m-stem at some
> late date. (I'm certain the pronoun was adopted in the Late IE
> period, but sure, let's talk about it.)
>
> If Tyrrhenian, Uralic and Altaic languages are most closely
> related to Indo-European (and I don't see what other language
> groups would be, if not them) none of them have any trace of the
> *eg pronoun, only validating further the notion that this is
> purely an IE invention... so what is it from?
>
> The problem is that I have only come across _one_ reasonable
> etymology for the origin of this pronoun. If there are better
> etymologies I want to know. Now, since *ego: can be seen to
> translate as "I am here" (*e-ge- "to be here" + -o:/-om [1ps
> thematic]) just as we find in the example of Inuktitut /uvanga/,
> we have an etymology that is semantically plausible and also
> existant in another real-world language. However, this hypothesis
> requires that *ego: or *egom is in fact the original pronoun,
> making *eg an eroded variant (and there is great motivation for
> such a two-syllable pronoun to erode into a one-syllable one like
> the others anyways). Luckily *ego:/*egom is attested anyways so
> there isn't much problem here.
>
> If we side with the *eg camp, we are left with too many
> unanswered questions. Why does a verbal ending *-o: secondarily
> attach itself to what should be a demonstrative unless it was
> already a verb signifying "to be here" to start with? Why would
> the pronoun fight the one-syllable tendency of other pronouns
> only to erode back into a one-syllable pronoun anyway (Latin ego
> >je, yo, etc)? Isn't this a less Occam-compliant theory? What on
> earth does *eg come from, by the way? Certainly not from *e-ge, an
> emphatic form of *e "here" since we _still_ have to conclude that
> the word has eroded from *e-ge to *eg. And perhaps I'm mistaken,
> but I recall no language that has come to use "here" as a reference
> to the 1ps, even though the semantics might seem vaguely possible.
>
> This latter view appears to me to be so much more inferior for
> these above reasons. Could somebody please address these questions
> properly? I honestly don't get it.
>
>
> - gLeN
>