Re: [tied] Nominative: A hybrid view

Jens,

I definitely don't want to get into the quarrel. Is it because of my
sex that I notice how unkind the gentlemen are to each other on this
list? I guess I was being a bit ironic in my comments as well. But
I do not believe sarcasm is the tool for making things clearer on any
topic.

Just a sweet remidner on that and, yes, I am aware of the Sandhi
rules in Sanskrit. Yet using your knowledge to offend others is only
a sign of ... (complete the sentence, using some old Indian
philosophy). Language is, after all, not just language
technocratically, nicht wahr?

Excuse the woman. In spite of your way of communicating to each
other, I enjoy the discussion (if and when I manage to follow a
thread through its constructive argument and not measuring-muscles
parts).

Eva


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen <jer@...>
wrote:

> Dear Eva,
>
> excuse me for resorting to sarcasm, I have no quarrel with you. The

fact

> just is your fortuna has landed you squarely in a hornet's nest. We

have

> been arguing over the finer shades of IE inflectional endings, and

when my

> opponent quoted "IE ablative *-od" with a short -o- and a voiced *-

d I

> just had to say, hey, this is not the level we're discussing on.

For one

> thing the vowel is always long, apparently even disyllabic, and

vacillates

> between o-timbre (as in Latin) and a-timbre (as in Baltic) and so

probably

> represents the contracted product of a sequence containing both

vowels.

> Another thing is that no IE language is capable of showing us

whether the

> final dental was originally a /-d/ or a /-t/. It is generally put

down as

> a /-d/, but that is just based on pre-classical Latin (and Oscan)

where

> final *-t and *-d both give /-d/. The Sanskrit ending of a-stems

is /-a:t/

> whose consonant alternates in sandhi between /-d/ and /-t/

depending on

> whether or not the following word begins with a voiced segment;

since

> original /-t/ and /-d/ alternate the same, the language is

incapable of

> telling us which consonant is really at play here. Since my

opponent's

> point was that the abl. has *-d developed from *-t because it was
> unchecked by analogical pressure from word-internal variants, and

probably

> also that the -o- is a consequence of the putative word-final

voicing,

> I had to insist that we don't even have these "facts" to ponder

over. Of

> course I knew he was basing himself on the ablative of Indo-Iranian

and

> Italic, but I had to object to a preform of precisely the shape *-

od.

>
> Jens
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, 22 May 2003, fortuna11111 wrote:
>
> >
> > > >What in heaven's name is ablative *-od ?
> >
> > Skr. -at
> >
> > I am proud of myself :-)
> >
> > Eva
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

> >
> >
> >