Re: [tied] IE genitive

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 21526
Date: 2003-05-05

Aquila:
>I to have discussed with Glen about stem-final wovels.

You mean vowels? :) I think wovels are cute furry pets, aren't
they? If not, they should be.


>I too think that the so-called thematic wovels originates from some
>stem-final wovels originating back to the steppe.

In actuality, we _all_ seem to agree on this now. Sometimes I find
it hard to express what I'm saying in entirety, but try to follow
me here. Vowels in stem-final position were dropped by Late Mid IE
due to heavy stress. However I also mentioned Suffix Resistance
where suffixes of the form -(C)V were not reduced any further.
This means, for example, that nominal stems ending in suffixes like
the adjectival *-ne or verbals stems ending in suffixes like the
thematic 3ps *-e, remained as is. Thus, MIE *-ne becomes *-no-s
(not **-n-s) and MIE *-e becomes *-e-t(i), not **-t(i).


>I do not think such an important thing could have developed so rapidly as
>Glen proposes.

It didn't develop rapidly but the thematic stem is not entirely
derivable to Mid IE for many reasons, one of the important things
being the innovative regular accent (acrostatic), another being
the innovative case system (eg: gen.sg *-syo, gen.pl *-o:m).
There is little that is ancient about thematic nouns given the
way they seem to operate in reconstructed IE.


>Glen postulates that the thematic wovel of nouns, originates from
>the genitive ending. I think this theory does not work,

You're right. The nominal thematic vowel derives more largely from
the surviving instances of final vowel from Mid IE thanks to Suffix
Resistance and verbal derivations. The connection with genitives is
merely an added nuance to this whole puzzle. In other words, I still
think that adjectives could be formed with genitives and that these
adjectives could be made into nouns by changing the position of the
accent. Thus, new thematic nouns were still created out of
originally genitival constructs as I've already said. But perhaps
the prolificness of these derivations is not as important as I once
thought. There is also the matter of endingless thematic verb stems
that could be theoretically nominalized as is, which could also be
a productive source of new thematic nouns. There are in fact a lot
of possibilities.

As for the example of *wlkWos however, this word was most probably
derived from the adjectival form. The zero-grading suggests an
originally final accent as we find with adjectives. Also, because
of the awkward zero-grading, this word looks like a late coinage.
I expect that if it were created in the early half of Late IE then
the resultant form would be **welkWos due to earlier ablaut rules.

Such adjective-derived thematic nouns do exist and continued to be
created after IE. Check out Sanskrit where the accent simply
alternates between the final and the initial position depending on
whether it is an adjective or noun. Similar accent alternations to
distinguish word types happen in English: /'reject/ (a noun)
versus /reject'/ (a verb).


- gLeN


_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail