Adverbs and pronouns

From: alex
Message: 26137
Date: 2003-09-29

Initially I got caught by the idea that the demonstrative pronouns have
something in common with the locative adverbs. The idea came as I seen
the mention of Abdullah about PIE *kWel and its /o/ grade *kWol.
Automatically I made the connection of the Romanian demonstrative
pronoun "acel" and the Romanian locative adverb "acolo".
Of course I was thinking as follow:
-if there is a relation between pronouns and adverbs which show
something which is not "near" then it must be the same relation between
pronouns and adverbs which show something "near", present speakers,
present situation, present places.
-if this should be a Reflex of IE syntactic, then this should be not
just in Romanian , but it should be in other languages too.

I was a bit disappointed since it seemed I could not find the similar
pair ( pronoun/adverb) for showing the immediate presence. Fortunately,
the Germanic languages helped here . Taking a look in my German
etymological dictionary, I could find out that "der, die, das, dort, da"
are all coming from one and the same root, the PIE *to-; fine I thought,
that is the explanation for the "far". But what about the "nearness"?
What about "hier, her"? And here was the big help. I found out they
derive from PIE *k^e- .
I must say, that is very interesting since it explain in my view the
imediate presence for the speaker in Romanian for both, pronouns and
adverbs like in english "he" and "here" versus english "that" and
"there"

Pronoun: acest (he, this one)
Adverb : aci (here)

The pronoun "acest" seems to be a compound of 3 elements meaning "here
is this".
I mean here the following PIE roots: k^e= here, es-= to be; to- = this:

k^e+es+to-> k^esto > cest

"cest" get sometimes prefixed with IE *ad1 and /d/ disappear being
absorbed by the affricated "c^".
Interesting this seems to fit the another demonstrative pronoun which is
"ãsta"= this one, an another word for "acesta".
"ãsta" seems to be the compound of
*es+*to- > esto > ãsta: the meaning is of course "is this"

It appears that the pronouns are easy to explain very well trough IE,
but what about the adverbs of that pair? What about "aci" (here)?
Well, it seems it is simply the compound PIE *ad1- +k^e
To sum up, we have demonstrative pronouns and adverbs which show the
presence and the not presence of objects, persons, in the moment one
speaks.

For immediate presence:

Pronouns: *es+ *to > esta > ãsta ( he, this one)
*k^e +es +to > c^esta > cesta ( he, this)
Adverbs: *ad^ + k^e > adc^e > aci (here)

For non immediate presence:
Pronouns: *kWel- > c^el > cel ( he, the one there)
Adverbs: *kWol- > colo ( there)

For persons who want to have the traditionally point of view, I will put
here the traditional explanations:

ãsta < Latin istum, ista
acesta < Latin *ecce-istu
aci < aici < Latin ad-hicce
cel < acel < Latin *ecce-illu
colo < acolo < Latin *eccum-[i]loc


Best regards
Alex