Odp: IE athematics, the Semitic w-verb and Akkadian /ala:ku/ vs. *

----- Original Message -----

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, March 24, 2000 11:13 AM

Subject: [cybalist] IE athematics, the Semitic w-verb and Akkadian /ala:ku/ vs. *leikW-

The IE verbs that we reconstruct such as *ed-, *es-, *ei-, *ghWen- etc. are obviously well established roots... in COMMON IE. However, Semitic wouldn't have interacted with Common IE. It interacted with "Old" to "Middle" IE according to the changes I list on the site, perhaps circa 6000-5000 BCE. By the time Common IE developed, the above verbs would be fully accepted and treated normally in every sense of the word just as we don't think anything bizarre about the verb "render" even though it's French /rendre/.

Funny thing: they borrowed mostly the commonest verbs. English has retained its good Anglo-Saxon words for 'eat', 'be/is/was/...', 'go', 'lie', 'come' etc., and so many of them are irregular... If we didn't know the origin of render, with your logic it would be the regular pattern to which it conforms that should be regarded as more primitive, while lie/lay/lain would be a minor oddity, probably borrowed from Semitic.

We've added tonnes of native affixes to it after less than a millenium (cf. "render-ing", "un-render", "render-ed", "render-er", etc) so your arguement to justify "basic verbs" as completely native because of their many derivatives doesn't hold here. Nor can we automatically dismiss verbs like *es- or *ed- as being loaned simply because they are so minimal. IE verbs generally are CVC anyway and are all quite basic-looking when compared to English or Russian verbs.

In your example render occurs with fully productive suffixes, which is hardly surprising. But the roots in question yield non-produtive and evidently archaic derivatives; that's more like English foul : filth or goose : gosling : gossamer (< OE go:s-sumor) -- formations that have become non-transparent and irregular. If you want an example close to your Canadian heart, nobody would think of calling a young moose (a 17th-c. Algonquian loan) a "mosling".

As for *es- specifically, it is a native verb by common IE but hardly a very
necessary verb nor ancient. There can be no archaic Steppe form for "to be"
and so this verb is innovative in some way or another. It couldn't have
originally meant "to be" either.

Also, I'm not trying to sweeten anything. Everything is deductive reasoning.
Maybe we should go step by step this time:

Most will agree that the 3ps *-et and 3ppl *-ént are related by a suffix *-t
which is nothing more than an attached demonstrative. We don't find *-t
anywhere else in Nostratic and certainly not in Uralic or Altaic. Taking *-t
away we are immediately left with *-e/*-én and this means that the root of a
thematic verb is identical with the third person singular. These suffixes
ARE attested in other Nostratic languages including Sumerian (-e/-ene) which
is exactly the forms we arrive at after applying the penultimate accent rule
backward in time to explain other grammatical links. The forms *-e/*-én are
quite frankly proven by other occasional plural pronominal suffixes in *n
(Gr -men, H -weni/-teni). They are easily explainable as a faulty
misinterpretation of archaic 3ppl *-én as 3ps *-e plus a non-existant plural
marker **-n that would later spread to all plural endings. There is no other
conclusion.

Since the thematic vowel doesn't have any strong meaning, its use must have
been less grammatical and more functional such as to seperate two consonants
in situations that would otherwise produce a syllabic catrastophe, such as
*-CC when adding singular Old IE suffixes like *-m "I", *-c "you", etc. We
find thematic vowels naturally used in this exact same way in other Steppe
languages.

[........]
But Piotr, my theory shows that *yeug- is in fact *yeu-g- since a Steppe form *yug- could only have yielded *yegW- at all. Verb forms with *euC- or *eiC- are caused by something within IndoTyrrhenian and are not inherited from Steppe. It's either a foreign word or a native verb *yeu- plus suffix *-g-.

Unfortunately, I work with PIE defined in accordance with the orthodox usage, and have not yet embraced things like Proto-Steppe. Nostratic is far too speculative for my taste. You juggle with conjectural roots and suffixes with admirable skill, but vague expressions like "some way or other" or "something within Indo-Tyrrhenian" will cut no ice with your critics. Your argument is punctuated with exhortations like "must have been", "couldn't have meant", "my theory shows" and "there is no other conclusion" while the speculation behind them would at best justify the use of "may have been".

I prefer to let Sumerian alone when discussing IE, since I'm not aware of any convincing demonstration of their relatedness; and if some feature of PIE is not consistent with anyone's Nostratic reconstruction, that's not my worry either.

It would be rather easy to imitate your style, so perhaps I should respond with a pastiche, since the detailed refutation of a lengthy piece of deductive reasoning diluted with stream of consciousness is a tiresome exercise.

>But even typical thematic verbs like *bhere-ti have athematic >counterparts >of different types such as the reduplicated *bhi-bher->ti; cf. *gHeue-ti >versus *gHi-gHeu-ti (from *gHeu- 'make an >offering'. Also the suffix >*-n(e)u- produces athematic stems (like *t@... >'becomes tense'). >Sometimes we have very simply the same root with >or without the thematic >vowel, like *teke-ti~*tek-ti 'runs, flows'. Methinks you're only confusing the issue. You're getting into things that should be covered by a subsequent "Verner's Law" to explain them but this is to do with common IE or later, not Middle IE. If the forms you present do not, in IndoAnatolian, maintain the athematic/thematic contrast as in the non-reduplicated conjugations we were talking about (*bhere-/*es-), there's no need to mention them since there is only one regular pattern for those forms. Or are there thematic verbs with affixes (like a causitive in *-(n)eu-e-) honestly reconstructed for IE? I know variations exist in Sanskrit (/invati/ I recall) but this surely isn't from IE. >Or *leigh-ti~*lighe-ti~*leighe-ti~*linghe-ti~*leigh-je-ti 'licks' (this is >what is technically known as polymorphism). Come on, Piotr, this is a cheap arguement. The "polymorphic" forms you present could not be all reconstructable to common IE nor could this be a common problem with IE verbs unless you're part of the camp that find IE reconstruction futile. Quite irrelevant. I don't see anyone seriously reconstructing all possible variations found just anywhere in IE. Maybe we should reconstruct *esti/*eseti/*ensti/*esyeti as well? There is most certainly an original form in that mess that is validly IE. The forms with *-n- or *-ye- are obviously _derivatives_ and not quite the same verb (you're being cleverly or unknowingly deceptive). We are left with only three variations: *leighti/*ligheti/*leigheti. Of the three, *ligheti is quite invalid for common IE, so what you're talking about is the same situation as *tek(e)ti where the verb can not easily be ascertained as athematic or thematic. Irrelevant and redundant since issues that haven't been resolved in IE can neither be support nor proof against a hypothesis.

It's neither a cheap argument or a simple problem. While *esti is a very secure reconstruction, and there is no evidence for anything like *esjeti etc., there are roots which produce a whole constellation of more-or-less synonymous derivatives (I don't claim they are "the same" verb, but they form a cluster of closely related verbs). It seems likely that such variation existed already in PIE; it did at any rate all exist in Greek, Hittite, and especially (as you justly say) Old Indic, where 'he fills' (root pr:- < *p(e)lh-) could be piparti (< reduplicated *pi-pelh-ti), pRn.a:ti (< *p@... with a nasal infix), or puryate (< *p@...). The root hu:- (*< gHeux-) 'invoke' had five different present-tense forms.

You could claim that these forms are late derivatives and that all that "real" PIE had was the "underived" *pelh-e- (thematic) or maybe *pelh- (athematic). However, in this particular case (involving a very common root) "simplex" stems are unattested: postulating them as a necessity, just in order to satisfy a preconceived scenario, is what I call Procrustean reconstruction (you have to chop off the suffixes, reduplicated syllables, etc.). PIE was no Esperanto; it very likely tolerated a good deal of variation, competing derivations and other kinds of healthy diversity (such as alternative case forms for the same root noun). This doesn't mean that PIE reconstruction is futile; it only means that sometimes we must reconstruct a range of possible forms rather than a unique form.

BTW, I've no idea what you mean by *lighéti being "quite invalid" for Common IE. You seem to insist that thematic verbs had obligatory root stress, but this is plainly wrong. Stress in thematic verbs was immobilised, but not exclusively root-bound; it could fall on the thematic vowel in the so-called oxytonic pattern -- thus normally in asigmatic aorist stems, but also in a number of well-attested presents.

Piotr