Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas.

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

From: petegray

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2000 12:35 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas.

Someone (I get lost in the back and forth of correspondence) said:
>Grammatically and phonologically B-Sl. is closer to Indo-Iranian than to
Germanic. It is mainly shared vocabulary that connects it with Germanic,

I said it.

This is open to question and debate, and in my opinion, rebuttal.   Baltic
and Slavic share several features with Germanic and not with I-I, and all
three groups (or two if you count B-S as one) lack the many innovations
which I-I shares with Greek, particularly in verb morphology.

Shared features (against I-I):
1.  no differentiation of endings of perfect and aorist

 

But Germanic uses the old perfect as the preterite, while Baltic and Slavic use old aorist and imperfect forms in this function. This militates AGAINST connecting Germanic with B-Sl., if anything.

 

2.  secondary tenses not marked by -i

 

Slavic secondary endings ARE marked by *-i, and so are the relicts of athematic present endings in Baltic (Old Lithuanian esmi, essi, esti)!

 

3.  absence of augment

 

Whatever the origin of the augment, it wasn't obligatory yet in Homeric Greek or in Vedic, so it's difficult to exclude its secondary loss in B-Sl. The absence of the augment in Gmc. is due in the first place to the loss of the grammatical categories which made use of it.

 

4.  absence of -osyo genitive

 

But Germanic *o-stems have genitives derivable from *-oso, while in B-Sl. the old ablative in *-o:t replaced the original genitive. As we don't know what the latter was like, you can't claim that B-Sl. clusters with Gmc. in this respect.

5.  absence of ma: negative

True.

6.  absence of locative plural in -su

Slavic *-xU in the Loc.pl. is from *-su. For example, OCS vlIcExU corresponds to Skt. vRkes.u segment for segment (< *wlkWo-i-su)

7.  presence of dative plurals in -m- instead of -bh-

 

This problem was discussed on Cybalist in some detail a few months ago. It should be possible to find that thread.

8.  interconsonantal H falls

 

But it leaves clear traces in B-Sl. intonations if the first consonant is a sonorant. The laryngeal must have been there in Proto-B-Sl.

 

9.  no -teros comparative

 

The "contrastive" suffix *-tor-o- does occur in a few words like vUtorU 'second, other' (also in Germanic). The comparative in *-jos-/*-is- occurs virtually in all the branches, including Indo-Iranian and Greek. The *-ter-o- of contrast may have acquired a comparative meaning independently in several branches.

 

Piotr