Re: [tied] i-verbs in Baltic and Slavic

On Uto, svibanj 23, 2006 12:34 am, Miguel Carrasquer reče:

> That leaves the infinitive, where, despite the wildly
> different (i~ vs. a~) development in the present forms,
> Slavic and Baltic show remarkable agreement down to the
> (acute) intonation: Slavic -i"ti, Lith. -ýti. Where can
> this acute come from? There are a few possibilities in
> Slavic, but the Lithuanian form can, or so I think, only be
> explained as *-iH- (certainly not *-ei- or *-eiH-).

(...)

> The second laryngeal does surface in the Balto-Slavic
> infinitive, which is athematic and stressed on the ending
> *-té(:)i, leaving the causative marker in zero grade
> *-(H)ih1-. That would explain the Balto-Slavic acute.

I would also like an acute explanation, but maybe an analogy is also
possible? Almost all the verb suffixes in Slavic and Lithuanian are acute,
cf. Slavic *-E´´ti (E =jat), *-a´´ti, Lith. -é.ti, -óti.
However, *-eyH- and *-iH- would do nicely also, but I suppose there's no
proof of *-eyH- instead of *-ey- elsewhere in IE? We could perhaps compare
this suffix with the optative one, where *-oih1- > *-oy- in the process of
thematization.

Mate