Re: [tied] IE *-su and the Nostratic "equational" marker *-n :)

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000 20:43:04 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>It's a formalist expectation, Miguel. IE inflections don't conform to this kind of agglutinative logic

They don't. But what I've done is assume they once did, and see if
that would reveal some interesting patterns.

>However, *-i does occur with *-su in the thematic declension (*wlkWo-i-su). This suggests that *wlkWoi is the locative proper, while *-su is a postposition.

No, -oi- is here a plural (> dual) morpheme, straight from the
pronominal declension (and hence found in the o-stems, which are to be
interpreted as adjectives/nouns with postpositioned pronoun, much like
the later Slavic definite adjectives). All my books are packed (I'm
moving tomorrow), but from memory we find the -oi- in the Skt.
dat./abl.pl. (-oi-bhi-o-s) [one suspects from earlier *-oi-os] and in
general in the ins.pl. *-o:is < *-oi-h1-s. It also occurs in dual
forms like Grk. -oiin/-oiun < *-oi-Hw-i-m.

>Greek *-si is clearly secondary, formed as if to gratify your insistence that the Loc.pl. "should also have *-i". Its late origin and analogical spread squares well with its untypical occurrence after vowels and sonorants in the Dat./Loc.pl. of most declensions. Cf. the spread of Lithuanian locatives in -e (pl. -s-e) < *-en.

Are there Greek forms with -su?

>As the locative of *-i/*-u stems (and often of consonantal stems) is endingless, the Loc.pl. in *-su could be analysed -- rather conjecturally, I admit -- as a zero-ending locative plus *-su.

Of course. I'm just saying that *-su itself can be analyzed as *-sw-
(plural) + *-i (deictic). If *-i really had been the locative ending,
we would have had *-is, not *-su. Agglutination *works*...


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...