Re: [tied] Thematic root aorist

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jens Elmegård Rasmussen <elme@...>
wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@> wrote:
>
> > For the moment at least I prefer Jens's
> > explanation: the entire category of "subjunctive" was lost
> > in Anatolian, and since the bHárati-stems were still
> > subjunctives at that point (as they are, for the most
> > part, in Tocharian!), they were lost together with the
> >whole lot.

I don't get it. A whole class of verbs occurred only in
the subjunctive??

> I really must pass on the credit to Jochem Schindler.
> This is one of the things I remember quite distinctly.
> He had another one: "What comes out of IE initial *r-
> in Hittite? It is lost along with the rest of the word."
> This was said with a plain face followed by a big grin
> after a pause. What he meant was that initial r- was
> not tolerated and the words containing it were abolished,
> i.e. replaced by synonyms. I was never told what
> examples he had in mind, and I never remembered to
> ask anyone who might have known.
>
> As for the abolition of the subjunctive structure,
> I believe that has quite a good chance of being correct.
> What has convinced me is the strange fact that it is
> not only the thematic stem formation of the verbs
> concerned that is missing, the particular verbs do
> not in fact occur in *any* form. If the thematic
> inflection of *bher-, *H2eg^-, *weg^h-, *pekW-,
> *dhegWh-, *leg^-, *seg^h-, etc. was just a morphological
> innovation which Anatolian did not share, then one
> would expect the verbs to show whatever stem-formation
> they had before they took on thematic shape. But the
> verbs just are not there. Since the verbal roots involved
> apparently are as old as anything in IE, there
> remains only the explanation that they have been
> abolished. But why would speakers suddenly cease to
> tolerate verbs that had presents of the structure
> *bhér-e-ti, *ség^h-e-ti, etc.? Well, if forms like
> *H1és-e-ti, *gWhén-e-ti, *H1éy-e-ti, i.e. subjunctives,
> were beginning to be felt as bad and foul language, and
> opinions became very strong, then, to be on the safe side,
> some may just have avoided the *CéC-e/o- structure
> altogether. My own imagination goes as far as using
> the subjunctive as a shibboleth in a process of ethnic
> cleansing. If I had a Hittite army riding into my region
> I would certainly go easy on signals of being special.
> I do not know it *was* that way, but there is room for it.
>

I think you mean an anti-Hittite army, if the effect would
be to change the Hittite language? ;-)
Also the two opposing parties would have to speak languages
so similar that they were able to distinguish subjunctives
in the speech of the other party. Which event was that?

> The Tocharian paucity of thematic presents is in my
> opinion different from this. As I see it, it was the
> usual fate of pre-Tocharian aorist subjunctives to
> become present indicatives, and Tocharian repeated
> the process with the subjunctive of the new aorist
> (s-aorist) which yielded the se/o-present. The small
> number of thematic presents in Tocharian represents
> then, I submit, the tenacious core presents that would
> not yield, the last ones to survive, not the first ones
> to be made.
>
> Under these views, both Anatolian and Tocharian are
> derivable from IE as we know it without any serious
> problems. For other reasons, the two branches may still
> be the first ones to split away from the common
> trunk, but it is not shown right here.
>

Let me try to rephrase, in order to understand.

PIE split into three groups:
1. Hittite
2. Tocharian
3. 'neo-IE'
In group 3. there exists a group of verbal roots which
are inflected according to a special paradigm, the
thematic paradigm. They are not found in group 1. or
group 2.

OK?

From this, the collected linguistic wisdom concludes
that this group of verbal roots existed in PIE.

Huh? I don't get it.

The justification you give here is that they look just
as old as anything else in IE.
No they don't. *ag^- contains an /a/, for instance.
And they are all prominent members of Bomhard's and
anyone else's attempted Nostractic root collection,
which makes me suspicious. If the language families
that survived to this day in our part of the are all
descended from languages of a tribe who 'got it', when
the various neolithic tecnological revolutions passed
by them, then there almost has to be a package of roots
for designating items of that technology loaned into the
founder languages of those surviving language families,
and I believe *bher- (< *bhar-), *ag^-, *weg^- (< *wag^-)
etc were such roots.

Similarly, group 3 has roots starting in *r-, Hittite
doesn't. Therefore PIE had roots in *r-??

I'd say no.


Torsten