Re: [tied] Re: Nominative Loss. A strengthened theory?

From: enlil@...
Message: 32019
Date: 2004-04-19

Richard:
> Condemn Glen for his true errors. If I remember correctly, Glen's
> understanding of the development of PIE has developments *& > PIE *e
> and *a > PIE *o. *& also has conditioned developments. The only
> ulterior motive in '*ya' might be a desire to confuse, but I doubt
> he has such a motive.

All this condemnation gives me tingles of excitement. I feel like
I'm going to be charged and sentenced to the guillotine for my
slanderous remarks against the Church and State. Teehee! Off with
my head! How blasphemous my very existence must appear to be to
some.

Seriously, though. While I technically write MIE *e for [&], yes,
I do say exactly that. At least somebody is listening. Thanks,
Richard. To be clearer, I will write both the phonetics and the
phonemics here. This is frustratingly simple. Concerning stressed
vowels:

MIE *e [&] > IE *e
MIE *a [a] > IE *o

Unstressed vowels were affected by reduction or Syncope:

MIE *e [&] > eLIE *&
MIE *a [a] > eLIE ZERO

And as I said, the stress was once predictable according
to QAR so there shouldn't be any confusion about what I think
because, maybe I'm bias, but I don't think it's that difficult.
Of course there are exceptions to the above like Paradigmatic
and Suffix Resistance, but the exceptions are minor, as they
should be.

From eLIE *&, we have a later rule that confuses the issue
between me and Jens, the rule of Schwa Diffusion, whereby
*& lengthened before voiced phonemes while remaining short
otherwise. I interpret it as follows:

eLIE *& > *[&/&.] > IE *e/*o

I don't know why Jens has gotten into the habit of calling my
preprotoform of *yo- as the "horrible *ya" but now I'm _really_
laughing my ass off. I mean, you have to admit that it's a
hilarious title. At any rate, the above rule has no bearing on
the *-yo in genitive *-o-syo unless Jens can prove that *-o is
supposed to alternate here. Since he can't and merely ASSUMES
that it should alternate, and therefore assumes even more that
there should have been *-e (based on what??!), he's based his
entire theory on a fantasy.

I say that *-o doesn't need to alternate here and never did. It
could just be plain ol' *o (and hence from earlier *a in my
theory). This is why I correct my error and said *ya instead
of erroneous **y&, for the very fact that we _don't_ see an
alternation and because **-sy& would falsely yield **-sye.
Therefore, quite plainly, **-s-y& is false and *-s-ya is correct.

So I reconstruct *ya. Afterall, if we don't know either way, _not_
expecting an alternation is more optimal than assuming blindly
that it should without proof! Again, plain and simple.


> Maybe the 'owner of' morpheme (which I wrote as 'OWN-' last night)
> is not quite zero.

I will admit that I can't say _exactly_ what went on with the
development of *-syo, but then neither can Jens. We can only see
what we see and strive to push that boundary further as we uncover
more. We see that *-yo must be a relative pronoun because there
is no other satisfying explanation. We see that this disobeys
IE grammar where we normally see a relative pronoun preceding
the clause. There are two explanations that I can't rule out.
Although to be honest, the first one seems more sensible.

One is that *-yo was suffixed to the stem based on a different grammar
than we see in IE proper. This is very possible given the etymology
of *-s from *so, 3ps *-t(-i) from *to- and inanimate *-d from *to-
which suggest postpositioning. There has been some debate concerning
traits in IE long before me that suggest an earlier SOV order (more
in line with what we see in Uralic and Altaic, btw) and placing a
relative pronoun after a clause would be more in line with such an
earlier SOV order.

Of course, *yo might have been meant to affect the following
possessed noun in the construction, following more in step with
the grammar reconstructed for the latest stage of IE. However,
either way, we need to get a relative pronoun to convey a genitive.

Jens has a pesky habit of assuming. On this topic in particular,
he wildly assumes at least three things that he has no business
asserting because he hasn't sufficiently proven them as anything
other than unnecessary conjecture:

1. that *-o in *-syo must be the "alternating" *o

2. that *z was phonemic

3. that *z also followed *-syo


So far, Jens proves none of the above and issues these ideas as
his own "decrees". Until he does systematically show the above,
I'm going to continue along the more optimal path:

1. that *-o in *-syo is simply plain *o

2. that [z] was only ever an allophonic variation of *s

3. that there never was an ending after *-syo

Doesn't everyone immediately see how much more sense that is?

Number 3 can only be understood fully once we see why locatives in
*-i must be a late innovation based on, ironically, an endingless
locative *i. For what else can they possibly be but that? We also
see postfixing of other locative particles like *bHi and *dHi as
well, so everything I'm saying is normal. Then, we can see that
*-yo is a locative and we don't need to force anyone to believe
that there are imaginary endings with a special phoneme *z which
in itself is imaginary.


= gLeN