From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 3494
Date: 2000-08-30
----- Original Message -----From: Glen GordonSent: Wednesday, August 30, 2000 12:19 PMSubject: [tied] Pecularities of Steppe Grammar and MethodologyA few remarks concerning Hittite:
(1) It isn't quite true that Hittite inanimates may not function as subjects. Your second type of sentence (with an intransitive verb) is perfectly possible in Hittite and does not require the transformation of the subject into an animate form. Also predicates without a copula (of the type harki pir parkui 'the white house-INANIMATE [is] clean', cf. asus antuhsas tasus 'the good man-ANIMATE [is] strong) take them as subjects. It's true, though, that inanimate subjects are avoided with transitive varbs. If an inanimate becomes the logical subject of a sentence, the suffix -antsa (-ant-) may be added to make it animate:
Nu-wa-mu apat WATAR pesten parkunummas-wa kuis WITENANTSA ashar ... parkunutsi.
And now (he said) give me this water-INANIMATE, [that] of purification (he said), which water-ANIMATE will purify the blood ... .
The same -ant- suffix formed collectives and participles (active if the verb base was intransitive, passive otherwise) and was very common in "elements of nature" (no wonder, since words like winter, rain, wind, etc. often function as logical agents). It's easy to see how it could have developed its agentive function. E.g. PIE *xuh-ont- (Hittite animate huwant-) meant 'blowing', hence 'the elemental force that blows = the wind', so that *-ont- > -ant- became associated with non-human agents.
(2) Hittite does have thematic inanimates in -an = *-om. In Old Hittite inanimate nouns have the ending -an (yukan, pedan), while adjectives vary (palha ~ palhan 'wide'). On the whole, the -a forms are considered younger.
One may argue that the ending, though as old as literary Hittite itself, is a post-Proto-Anatolian innovation; otherwise we would expect PIE *-om > Hittite -un word-finally. However, the trouble is that the accusative of animates also ends in -an, not -un. If analogy (-a-n for *-u-n because of -a-s) could force old *-un to become -an in the animate declension, why not in the inanimate one as well (after Gen. -as, Abl. -ats)? To sum up, the evidence is inconclusive: it's impossible to establish if Pre-Hittite thematic inanimates had *-o or *-o-m (there is a similar problem in Slavic).
Of course the reamaining inanimate declensions have no -m in the Nom./Acc.sg. and this is surely the original state of things. The question is only when and why the o-declension developed the innovative ending *-om.
Piotr
Steppe must have had the *-m accusative ending but only for _animate_ nouns as it is in IE. Inanimate nouns were simply not allowed to be the subject of a sentence. Check out Hittite which does exactly the same thing and is partly the basis for this rule in the first place.
This is how the above sentences would be spoken the ProtoSteppe way:
1.a) "The tornado turned that city into a junk yard"
b) "City-that junkyard-into tornado-by turn-[passive]-[3ps]."
OR RATHER...
"That city was turned into a junkyard by the tornado."
2.a) "The sun shines"
b) "Sun shine-[3ps]"
OR RATHER...
"The sun shines"
(... in this case, the sun may be viewed as a _deity_
and therefore ANIMATE)
3.a) "That music made me remember things that I had forgotten
years ago".
b) "Forgot-[passive] many year before-[locative] that
thing- [ablative/partitive] music-that-[ablative/partitive]
me remember-[causitive]-[3ps]."
OR RATHER...
"It caused me to remember from that music of things that I
forgot many years ago."
... This last one is nasty if I understand Steppe grammar
right because it's the inanimate-subject rule combined
with a weird partitive aspect. In this case, the initial "It"
is a non-subject 3rd person and doesn't refer to anything
(eg "It's raining"). Does your head hurt yet? Mine does.
And if we consider the 2x3 contrast of inanimate/animate
gender and proximal/medial/distal location within the
demonstrative set, your head is really going to hurt.
Anyways, point is, inanimate nouns were never _grammatically speaking_ the subject and circumventive methods were used instead. Therefore, we need not terminate an _inanimate_ noun with *-m for the object because the inanimate noun is ALWAYS the object.