--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
> This seems to differ from earlier accounts. Is that correct?
Yes. I have only gradually come to realize the importance of the
anaptyctic development. The new idea is not in conflict with
anything of what I have thought earlier, but it adds an explanation
of some things that were left unexplained because they were (and are)
generally not cared about.
> I'm not sure I understand the advantage of this approach
> with the underlying vowel-less suffixes (*-tVr vs. *-mn(t)).
> You still need a special mechanism to explain <poimé:n>, so
> why not leave things as they were: all suffixes have an
> underlying (short) vowel, and accentuation on the root or on
> the suffix is a lexical given (apparently governed by
> animacy).
But that is the *same* explanation, or lack of it. Assigning the
suffixal accent of poimé:n to high animacy is also a matter of what
is now called "internal derivation". I couldn't get an interplay of
animacy working in the verb. Or would verbal forms consistently have
high animacy? That would in fact work, as far as I can see. It would
demand that thematic adjectives have high animacy yielding *-tó-, *-
ró- and even *-ó-. That would perhaps not be a problem, but feminine
participles in *´-nt-iH2, gen. *-nt-yéH2-s which I have up kept my
sleeve could then not be accounted for as I have thought: a stem in
*-nt-yH2 has the accent on the root, but the addition of a flexive
moves it to the anaptyctic vowel before the stem-final, yielding an
explanation of the remarkable accent mobility between intial and
penultima.
If the accentuation in *-té:r as opposed to ákmo:n is credited to
animacy, *all* suffix vowels could be anaptyctic except the thematic
vowel (unless one invents a consonant for it, as I used to do faute
de mieux). Then not even *d¤g^h-m-ós (with schwa secundum) would be
irregular (amphikinetic), for the accent has then been moved from
the root to the next vowel there is, which is that of the ending. If
this is true accent assignment may operate on the full shape
including the anaptyctic vowels and places the accent according to a
hierarchy of animacy. But it may also have operated already on the
unepenthesized structure, in which case oxytonesis in animates is a
later process, as indeed it is when it is repeated many times down
to the living languages. The truth could also lie in any combination
of the two "pure" solutions.
> I still think that's a nicer explanation, than
> one in which some suffixes are, for some unknown reason,
> vowelless, and others not.
Why should there be given reasons for the different shapes of the
suffixes? The linguistic sign is arbitrary.
> Shouldn't that be *H1n.H3-mn-ós?
Oh no, the stem ends in -C-mn, whence *-C-men already in the lexical
form; the addition of a syllabic inflectional morpheme *-os causes
the accent to move onto the next vowel, which is here the anaptyctic
vowel of *-men-. The form is reflected in OIr. anmae, und underlies
Ved. -manas. In the Ved. man-stems it is only the instr.sg. that
reduces the cluster -mn-, so the genitive and the dative certainly
had full grade in the suffix *-mén-s, *-mén-ey.
Jens