On Wed, 22 Nov 2000 22:05:37 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<
gpiotr@...> wrote:
>I'd say that internal reconstruction is a legitimate way of speculating about the origin of synchronic alternations, also those reconstructed on a comparative basis. It isn't part of the comparative method; to put it crudely, it begins where comparison has exhausted its means. There is no way to constrain internal reconstruction within PIE -- you can exercise as much intellectual freedom there as you wish -- but good (i.e. typologically plausible) alternative solutions to most problems can easily be offered and cannot be ruled out. This is why the results must remain speculative and will never be trusted to the degree that comparative reconstructions are trusted.
Of course. Pre-PIE is by definition more insecure than PIE, which is
more insecure than, say, Proto-Slavic, etc. Uncovering former
regularities out of present (if we can call Hittite, Mycenaean or
Vedic "present") irregularities (e.g. unraveling the probable
agglutinative origins of the flectional knot), can only discover part
of the truth: it cannot recover past irregularities "now" regularized,
for instance. However, I think that although the process of internal
reconstruction is speculative, the results (if any) can become more
secure if they start explaining all kinds of things that they weren't
meant to explain in the first place. They can also be confirmed by
external evidence, even though that would require first accepting some
kind of "Nostratic", which many are unwilling to do.
>These "extra explanations" have been provided by many authors. The problem has always been of interest to Slavicists. Would you also say that Slavic *-U (as in the Acc.sg.m.) and *-o (as in the Nom./Acc.sg.n.) cannot both derive from IE *-om?
Obviously not. The o-stem neuters in -o can only be explained (from
what I've seen) as deriving from *-od (the ending taken over from the
pronoun *tod), or from the neuter s-stems (nom/acc.sg. *-os). The
first solution cannot be ruled out, although it lacks parallels (*-od
was nowhere else transferred to the neuter o-stems). The second
solution again leads to the paradox found in the masc. o-stems: how
can PIE *-os give OCS -U in the o-stems but -o in the s-stems (c.q.,
by analogy, the neuter o-stems)? Before recurring to morphological
conditioning factors, one should first investigate the "null
hypothesis" that the two *-os were not the same phonetically. As it
happens, there is at least one very good reason to think so: if we
disregard the thematic nom.sg., the quality of the thematic vowel, *e
or *o, can be predicted exactly by looking at the consonants following
it: if it is voiceless (*-e-t (incl. *-e-nt), *-e-s, *e-h1, *-e#), we
have *e, if it is voiced (*-o-m, *-o-d, *-o-i, *-o-u, *-o-bh), we have
*o. The major exception is indeed the nom.sg. *-os (and gen.sg.
*-osyo, if the first *o is a thematic vowel at all). Using internal
reconstruction, we might thus want to reconstruct this as **-oz. The
speculation becomes less boundless if we consider the evidence from
Slavic that nom.sg. *-os is unlikely to have been the same as the *-os
from the s-stems (with, as far as we know, real voiceless *s). (But
the question I haven't cracked yet is: was the *-o- really the same in
both?)
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...