----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 11:19 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: */m/ vs. */bh/
These endings and their syncretism patterns are the
IEist's nightmare. What's usually reconstructed for non-Anatolian IE is a mess
like this:
PLURAL
Gen. -om (consonantal stems); -o:m (in o-stems =
contracted -o-om)
Abl./Dat. -bH(j)os, -mos; (-o:is = Instr. in some
branches)
Instr. -bHi(:)s, -mis; -o:is
DUAL
Gen.(Loc.) -ous; -o:us (= -o-ous)
Abl./Dat./Instr. (-o)-bHjo:(m), (-o)-mo:
I don't know of any real evidence for a
Dat. pl. : Abl. pl. contrast anywhere (except in Hittite). The falling
together of the ablative and the genitive SINGULAR in Baltic & Slavic
was accompanied by a general rearrangement of functions, affecting also the
corresponding dual and plural forms. Any conclusions concerning the hypothetical
pre-merger form of the ablative plural are far too nebulous to be valid. The
explanation of the *bH > *m shift mentioned by Glen (influence from the
genitive plural) is attractive, though one would have to assume two
stages:
(1) *-bHis > *-mis, *-bHos > *-mos (influenced by
*-om)
(2) Dat./Instr. dual *(-o)-bHjo: > *(-o)-mo: in
Balto-Slavic (influenced by pl. *-mis, *-mos); also Instr. sg. *-(o)bHi >
*-(o)mi attested in Baltic i/u-stems and generally in Slavic.
There's no data for Germanic as regards (2), and (1)
seems trivial enough to have happened independently in Germanic and Balto-Slavic
(the details of the change differ between the branches anyway). Note that the
Instr. pl. *-o:is survives in Balto-Slavic o-stems while it's fate in
Proto-Germanic (where a uniform ending was generalised for the
syncretic Dat./Instr. case in nouns) is unknown. The argument for *bH >
*m (in case endings) being a common Germanic/Balto-Slavic innovation is very
skaky indeed.
Piotr
Urban writes:
I seem to recall having read somewhere in a footnote that
someone has suggested that the dative and ablative plural originally were
distinct in form, i.e. that one of them had *m, the other *bh. Does anyone know
who/where, or have I just dreamt it?
If we take this suggestion seriously,
what are the odds of finding out which one had *m and which one *bh? (We may
safely assume that instrumental had *bh.) No IE branch has an ablative form in
the plural that differs from the dative (apart from Hittite, which, however, has
an ending of its own, the same as in the sing.). Italic and Indo-Iranian are
useless, since both preserves dative and ablative as distinct cases (though not
formally in the plural). Germanic isn't very helpful either, since dative and
ablative merged both formally and functionally. In Balto-Slavic, however, there
are both formal and syntactical indications that the ablative merged with the
genitive instead. This might be considered an argument that dative had *m, which
was preserved, whereas the old ablative plural ending was lost in favour of the
genitive plural ending (somewhat like in Greek). If it had been the other way
around, dative *bh and ablative *m, the dative -mU/-ms/etc. would, of course, be
more difficult to explain. The as
However, how do we explain *m in the
instrumental? Back to influence from the genitive ... Or could it be influence
from the dual, where all three cases (as far as we know) where identical? And:
why did ablative and dative merge in so many languages?
Also, does anyone
know of any evidence for (traces of) a distinct instr. pl. form in Germanic
besides Old English thae^m with i-umlaut (*toimis instead of *toibhis), or any
other explanation for the Old English form?
Urban
Lindqvist