Germanic and Baltic
>> 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.
My reply:
(a) There is no such thing as an old imperfect.
(b) Germanic makes pereterites from Reduplicated forms and the long vowel
forms which appear as aorists in I-I and Greek, and as perfects in Latin.
(c) Whatever form is used, it remains true that Germanic and B-S have not
separated (or have merged) the endings of perfect and aorist.
>> 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)!
My reply:
I'm sorry! I meant to write: they are not marked by the absence of -i!
(and esmi etc is of course primary, not secondary)
>> 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.
My reply:
You're assuming that the verbal structure of Greek and I-I was present in
PIE. That remains at best unproven, at worst unlikely. At any rate, we
cannot work from a debated premise to a firm conclusion. I accept that
this argument could go either way - but note that it remains something that
links Germanic and Baltic and Slavic, against Greek and I-I.
>> 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.
My reply:
Wilhelm Streitberg, "Urgermanische Grammatik" (my translation): " In
Germanic only *-so can be proved, whose final vowel is already lost at the
beginning of [attested languages]." (page 227).
Elsewhere I've seen the suggestion that the Germanic genitive ending was
taken over from the pronouns.
As for Baltic, if your comment is right (I have no reason to doubt it) then
your argument is certainly 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)
My reply:
You're right. Szemerenyi p165 "The locative plural has the ending -su in
the satem languages, but Greek presents -si. ..."
>> 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.
My reply:
There was a suffix -ter or -Hter to denote opposition inrelationship.
Perhaps this is connected to the comparative -teros, but it seems to habe
produced consonantal stem nouns, whereas -teros is thematic.
Peter