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

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000 08:24:52 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>Well, some brand-new IE cases make their debut here, including the allative based (only?) on a very conjectural interpretation of the Hittite "directive", and a separate form of Abl.pl. (Hittite is the only language with a Dat./Abl.pl. contrast). I'd like to see some justification for Dat.pl. *-oi-os as different from Instr.pl. *-o:is.

**-oi-os is not attested, but I don't think it takes such a great leap
of the imagination to infer it from:

1) Hittite dat/loc.pl. -as (< *-os)

2) general PIE non-o-stem dat/abl.pl. *-bhi-os

3) Skt. o-stem dat./abl.pl. -ebhyas (< *-oi-bhi-os)

4) Skt. o-stem ins.pl. -ais (< *-o:is) besides -ebhis (< *-oi-bhi-s)

5) The Greek/Latin merger of ins.pl. *-o:is and dat/abl.pl. **-oios as
-ois/-i:s.

>The Dat./Instr. forms are based on very meagre evidence (with a Indo-Iranian centre of gravity); they don't match too well between different branches, and could well be analysed differently. I agree that *-s was used as a pluraliser in Acc., Dat. and Instr. forms, but the facts are messier than you make them look in your all-encompassing symmetries.
>
>Apart from all that, the Loc.pl. *-si/*-su occurs only in the eastern branches of IE (Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic and Greek), and we have real agreement only between Indo-Iranian and Slavic. Of course we need something to fill the gaps in our tables of PIE declensions, but to claim that these forms are really PIE is more than the comparative method entitles us to.

I'm usually, but not always, careful to claim these forms to be
"pre-PIE". For the rest I think internal reconstruction is a
legitimate part of the comparative method. It's obviously more
speculative than comparison tout sec, which would leave the
reconstruction of, say, the loc. pl. undecided as *-su ~ *-si. I
don't think it's in itself more speculative than explaining away Greek
*-si (which is a real, messy fact) as "analogical" without there being
any evidence for that in Greek, or postulating, as Szemerényi does,
two phantom words *i "here" and *u "there", or merrily ignoring the
simple phonological facts by deriving the Arm. nom. pl. -k` as well as
the nom.sg. and gen.sg. -0 from the same PIE *-s (same goes for Slavic
*-U and *-o, both supposedly from *-os : that just can't be right, not
without a whole lot of extra explanations, which I haven't seen).


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