Piotr:
>Any examples of its use as such in _any_ branch? Judging from the reflexes
>(such as Eng. few, Lat. paucus, etc.), we've got a primary adjective here,
>without a corresponding verb.
After rethinking, perhaps it's more like *paxu- "little" originating from
*pax-u- "protected". Regardless, couldn't an adjectival stem be given
the ending *-r at least? Basically *-r says "that/those which ..." and
*paxw-r would signify "that which (is) small" or "little one". The suffix
*-r is used for another natural element, *wod-r. Yet on the other hand, if
I'm right about deriving *paxu- from *pax-, then both etymologies would
ultimately signify the same thing:
*pax- + -wr "that which is guarded"
*pax-u- + -r "that which is guarded" (> "that which is little")
*pax-u- "protected" > "helpless" > "little"
On a related topic, I'm starting to think that "adjectives" (erh, or rather
nouns that happen to describe a quality) like *paxu- could be made into
verbs without any endings at an earlier stage of IE (specifically from Mid
IE
to early Late IE).
Basically, a stem like *paxu- "little" could become **pxeu- as a verb.
The reason for the shapeshifting lies in Mid IE where the 3ps, ending in
*-e would shift the penultimate accent to the last syllable of the verb
(eg: *pex-eu-e). After loss of unstressed schwa, you end up with a
nominal stem in CVCC- and a verbal counterpart of the shape CCVC-.
So I'm thinking that maybe verbs like *kleu- "to hear", for example, are
formed from adjectives (*kel-u- "called" < *kel(-x)- "to call"). That goes
too for the *-ei- verbal extension that I also suspect is adjectival in
origin. An example of *-ei- is *mn-ei- from *men- "to think" which would
theoretically be from an adjective *men-i- "thoughtful"(?).
I'd just like to add that since the s-aorists don't conform to this CCVC-
verbal pattern, I have come to the conclusion in the past few months that
they were originally deverbal stative nouns that were taken bare as verbs
to eventually convey this new aspect. Obviously, IE got a little more
synthetic since then and came to employ special denominal verb markers
like *-y[e/o]- and *-dh[e/o]-.
See? It all this morphology ties together! :) Does what I say sound
crappy? I'd like some thoughts on that.
- gLeN
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