Miguel:
>>What I had in mind was the PIE verbal system, where we find *m ~ *w
>> >>alternations in the 1st person,
Ah, I almost forgot. More stuff to ponder on, Miguel. As for the *m/*w
alternation, this is seen also in Uralic's subjective/objective verb system:
Nenets xadad?m versus xadav. In fact, we also see IE *wei-, don't we.
However, rather than jumping to a self-contradicting idea of *nw-/*w- or
*my-/*mw- or whatever the hell you've cooked up, I suggest that you consider
an underlying suppletive pronominal system in Nostratic which distinguished
ergative and absolutive case (this is the origin of the suppletive verb
endings in IE as well as Uralic's subjective/objective conjugation).
The Nostrative ergative 1ps was *nu/*mu while the absolutive was *?u. Before
saying that this is poppycock, check out AA's prefixal stative conjugation
in *?a- (Nostratic *?u) versus *?ana- (*nu/*mu) and Kartvelian *c^-we-n-
"our" (Nostratic *?u) versus *me- (*nu/*mu). In ProtoSteppe, the pronouns
were attached to the verb. The ending *-m (< *mu) functioned as transitive
and *-xW (< *?u) was for intransitive. The transitivity is semantically and
grammatically relatable to ergativity. Both IE and Uralic inheirited this
intransitive-transitive conjugation, with a few modifications of course.
EskimoAleut advanced the concept further with subject-object conjugation. IE
*wei- is nothing more than the absolutive pronoun *?u plus plural ending
(note also -w-es)
Have you tried grammatical analysis in your quest for Pre-IE? Sorry, Miguel,
but reconstructing *nw or *mw for some farout Pre-IE stage without even
going into depth on ancient grammatical processes as well and other in-depth
research that relates to true and competent reconstruction, fights against
the very external relationships that you seek to clarify.
- gLeN
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at
http://www.hotmail.com
Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
http://profiles.msn.com