Re: [tied] The 1ps pronoun *ego:... or is it *eg?

On Mon, 09 Dec 2002 04:07:31 +0000, "Glen Gordon"
<glengordon01@...> wrote:

>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])

Why *e-ge-? Does this *verb consist of two morphemes? What are they?

>just as we find in the example of Inuktitut /uvanga/,

But is uva- a verb that means "to be here"? Or is -nga here the
possessive suffix "my"?

>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?

Well, Anatolian has the form *amu(k), which seems to consist of *e-,
the possessive suffix *-mu, and the emphatic particle *-g^(e), as if
having the structure EMPH(POSS(THIS)) with optional emphatic, as
opposed to *eg^(om/o:) of the structure POSS(EMPH(THIS)), with
optional possessive.

>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.

Japanese <anata> "on that (other) side" -> "you".
Korean <i mom.i> "this body (this)" -> "I".

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