Re: [tied] Re: Various loose thoughts

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 15:06:07 +0000, tgpedersen
<tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>> Incidentally, speaking of the ins.sg. in *-mI: I do not
>> recall ever having encountered a detailed discussion of its
>> exact make-up or origin. That the form is old in
>> Balto-Slavic is shown by Lithuanian, which has i- and u-stem
>> ins.sg. forms -imi and -umi, and by the Balto-Slavic
>> accentuation of these endings in the mobile i- and u-stems
>> (*-imí, *-umí), which shows they are older there than
>> Pedersen's law (unlike Slavic o-stem *-omI/*-Umi). The
>> Slavic o-stem form, however, even if recent, may tell us
>> something about the structure of the ending. There is
>> general agreement that *-mI is the PIE adposition *bhi, but
>> what was it added to? I would suggest the answer is the
>> accusative singular: i-stem *-im-mi > *-imi, u-stem *-um-mi
>> > *-umi, and later in Slavic *-om-mi > *-omi but also in
>> part already *-um-mi > *-umi. For neuters other than o-stem
>> neuters, the ending *-imi would of course have to be
>> analogical (not **nebos-mi but *nebes-imi), but the
>> accusative solution also works for C-stem masculines
>> (*ka:menim-mi > *ka:menimi).
>
>
>Isn't accusative usually connected with movement towards (allative),
>and isn't *bhi, which has a locative sense, usually connected with
>the locative (German bei + dative, < locative?); in which case it
>would be -i + mi, -u + mi, which looks nice to those who think there
>existed locatives in both -i and -u (and I know you're not one of
>them).
>On the other hand, perhaps -m + bh- > -m-; I don't know whether there
>is a better explanation of the BSl-Germ-(and Ubian) -m- for -bh- in
>dat.loc. pl.?

What's Ubian?

Indeed the attractiveness of -m + bh- > -m(m)- is another
aspect that I forgot to make explicit favouring an origin in
acc. + *bhi. Since I don't believe that the adposition *bhi
has anything whatsoever to do with the (athematic) plural
oblique marker *-bhi-, it doesn't automatically follow that
where Balto-Slavic has -m- in the one, it should have -m- in
the other.

The adposition *-bhi may have been combined in PIE with
several cases, as so often. The Balto-Slavic forms of the
ins.sg., however, exclude the locative (we would have gotten
*-e:i-bhi, *-o:u-bhi, or, if -bhi came in lieu of -i, that
would have given *-ei-bhi, *-ou-bhi, same result).

The Greek forms with instrumental meaning (biê-phi "with
force", etc.) seem to be based on the pure stem, and so do
indeed the pronominal forms in Slavic, which I had
overlooked, têmI, imI, simI, cêmI etc., which are derived
from the "absolutives" *toi-, *ei-, *k^ei-, *kWoi- (cf. Skt.
ay-am (*ei), nominative sg., and a reflex of *kWoi or *kWei
as nominative in another language but I have forgotten
which... See also the Vedic instrumentals te:-na, ke:-na) +
*-mi. Perhaps the Balto-Slavic i- and u-stem ins. singulars
can be explained in the same way (although the "absolutive"
[i.e. vocative] of i- and u-stems ends in *-ei, *-eu, not
*-i, *-u). For the later and exclusively Slavic o-stem
ins.sg. in -omI, -UmI, both the accent (barytone), and the
raising of *-a- to *-u- before *-m in N. Slavic make an
origin in acc. + -mI the most likely solution.


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