Re: Odp: IE athematics

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

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2000 8:32 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: IE athematics

>You seem to assume (if you don't, correct me) that >morphologically 
>complex forms are DIACHRONICALLY reducible to >simpler ones, and that 
>today's suffixes are yesterday's clitics. Of >course this is often true, 
>but the question is, is it true often >enough for your analysis of the 
>thematic vowel to be the most >reasonable one (let alone the only 
>imaginable one)?

I don't see how it's an assumption in regards to IE. Do you know of any 
serious linguists proposing that IE came from a pre-history of complex 
consonant clusters and out-of-control polysynthesism?
There's a reason for this - the accent obviously had the ability to reduce 
CVCV' (where the last vowel is stressed) to CCV as in *es-/*s- or 
*bher-/*bhr-. Are you proposing that this was not the case?

I'm glad we've reached consensus on some points and made our positions clearer on others, but here I fail to see in what way your rhetorical questions are related to my comment. I expressed doubts about your diachronic interpretation of the thematic vowel. You base it on certain assumptions, and the particular one I mentioned had little to do with vowel reductions.

On a side note, I'm rethinking your remarks on *pelh-. There is no *pelh- at 
all, is there? I only find attestations that show *pleh- in Greek, Latin and 
Sanskrit. Of course, that there this a Semitic root *m-l-? "to fill" may or 
may not have a bearing on my so-far lunatic theory. I'll try to structure 
this theory according to your input and get back to you.

This *pleh- business is a more general phenomenon involving the so-called "state II" of "racines biformes" as the French call them. Aorists of this type appear in Indo-Iranian and Greek, and are presumably a relatively late East IE innovation, like the augment *e-. Other typical examples are *petx- 'fall' (the present stem) versus *ptax- (aorist) > pta:-/pte:-, or *molx- 'grind' (pres.) versus *mlox- (aor.) > Greek blo:-.

 

I really think you can't make a convincing case for ANY theory explaining the origin of thematics if you don't take a closer look at the system of aorist stems in PIE. For one thing, thematic aorist stems apparently had OXYTONIC stress, i.e. were stressed on the thematic vowel -- *bHugó-m, *bHugé-s, *bHugé-t, etc., as opposed to presents like *bHéuge-ti. Much of what is known as polymorphism must have resulted from present and aorist stems influencing each other's vocalism. I (well, not only I) suspect that the normal stress-switching pattern of thematics was dialectally generalised for athematic stems ending in a laryngeal, hence the above-quoted Graeco-Sanskrit forms.

 

Latin ple:nus is too isolated to be plausibly derived from an IE *pleh-nos; the expected adjective *p@... is simply too strongly supported by the rest of daughter-language evidence. It ought to have given (but failed to give) Latin *pla:nus, just as *xw@...:x 'wool' gave la:na and *g@... 'born' gave (g)na:tus. While ple:nus must be regarded as problematic, it is certainly an inner Latin problem.

 

Piotr