Re: [tied] Re: -osyo (Was: Nominative Loss. A strengthened theory?)

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:36:03 +0000, elmeras2000
<jer@...> wrote:

>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
><richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
>> It occurred to me this morning that I don't know how one would
>> express "The eye which the wolf has" in PIE. Perhaps it's just my
>> ignorance, but I can't think of the PIE for 'to have'!
>
>This is a hotly debated issue. A certain school of IE studies is
>adamant that IE, at least at an early stage, did not have any verb
>for "have". I do not like to make believe that I am more sure about
>earlier stages than about later ones, so I don't feel I can be so
>sure. If there was no verb, one way of expressing quite certainly
>was to use the genitive. So the construction would be "the eye which
>is the wolf's". What a person "has" is combined with that person in
>nthe genitive, including some archaic constructions with a
>participle used in an ergative-like manner which look the same in
>Indo-Iranian and Lithuanian. So there is very good reason to insist
>that at least a construction <<*wlkWosyo-yos *H3ó:kWs>> meant "the
>eye which is of the wolf", i.e. "the eye which the wolf has".

Schleicher reconstructed: *<avis yasmin varna: na a:st> "a
sheep that didn't have wool" (i.e. a locative). Of the other
versions quoted in EIEC, Lehmann/Zgusta opt for another
construction, with a genitive (and a different relative
pronoun): *<owis, kWesyo wl.Hna: ne e:st>. A dative
(*yosmo:i, *kWesmo:i) is of course another possibility.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...