Oh my...
>And of course the form <na:ma:>, silly me, is exactly equivalent to
>Lat. nomina but for the syllabification: *-mn-h2 > *-mn.: > *-ma:
Alright, so it might be reconstructable. You might have used Sanskrit
/na:ma:/ to begin with and saved us the trouble from the start. But at any
rate, *nomnx is a later formation than *nemo:n, okay? Can we agree now?
>Come to think of it, that's an old idea I had completely forgotten
>about. The genitive ending *had* a vowel following it, except that
>it's **-(a)si. Three reasons:
Erh, well at least he's comin' around slowly. No one's perfect :) The
Etruscan s- and l-genitives are probably related to the IE case endings.
>1) The Etruscan s-genitive can confidently be reconstructed as *-si.
It doesn't have to be reconstructed. This genitive is attested in written
Etruscan (and Lemnian, if I recall). If you mean Proto-Etruscan or
Proto-Tyrrhenian (Etruscan, Lemnian & Rhaetic), I would be more inclined to
reconstruct *-(e)se as in Mid IE.
>To quote Beekes & v.d. Meer:
>"An _ablative_ was formed by adding the gen. -s to the genitive.
What on earth are you saying? /Larthalisa/ means "from that which is of
Larth's", which is simply a genitive of a genitive, period. The genitive
itself however can always convey an ablative sense. This is why we sometimes
see genitive *-�s labeled "ablative" in IE. The words "from" (ablative) and
"of, belonging to" (genitive) are easily confusable in any language.
I don't understand why the genitive must be doubled before it can acquire an
ablative. Sounds like looniness again.
>The last two forms (ablative and dative) are easily understood if the
>genitives in -s and -l were originally adjectives [...]" >(translation
>mine).
The endings were adjectives?? I'm sure you mean that they were "adjectival
endings". Of course, it's far easier to accept that genitives formed
adjectives rather than vice versa given that adjectives in Etruscan are even
harder to pinpoint than in IE.
In the virtual absence of a nominative *-s like in IE, can we assert that
/s'utHi-na/ is an adjective meaning "pertaining to the tomb" or is it a noun
indicating those things that pertain to the tomb? Is /ras'na/ originally an
adjective? If so, why is it used only as a noun to denote "Etruscans"? You
have to let go of this obsessive adjective arguement. You can't win. It's
clear that noun and adjective are blurry from remote prehistoric times.
Accept it. Embrace the blurriness.
>2) The Luwian "pseudo-genitive" in -assi-. [...]
But how does this prove that the adjective ending is older than the
genitive? I don't think it proves anything at all either way.
>3) The PIE thematic/pronominal Gen. in *-osyo. In view of the normal
>G. in *-os (*-es, *-s), this is usually segmented as *-os + *-yo.
>However, given the preceding, one might also think of a segmentation:
>*-osi + *-o. Then *-osi would correspond exactly to Luw. -assi-
All to suit this equation? No dice. From my own observation, the genitive
*-osyo is simply used to differentiate an otherwise identical nominative
(like *wlkWos nom. versus *wlkWos-yo gen.). The *-yo ending is an actual
pronominal, of course. As I've been often told, "There's no need to reinvent
the wheel."
>[...] demonstrative pronoun (the thematic Gen. ending is
>pronominal after all): masc. *so, n. *to-d [which I derive from ERG.
>**tu + **-a: > *twa: > *so and ABS. **ta + -**a: > *ta: > *to-.
>Therefore, **ta-asi + **-a: > **ta:si + -**a: > *tosyo].
No. Again, check it out: *tos-yo versus *tos (nominative) just like *wlkWos.
Your *tot (or *tod, if you like) is simply from MidIE inanimate
demonstrative *ta. It has little to do with a long-lost ergative case. The
*-t/*-d (itself from inanimate *to) has been secondarily introduced in Late
IE by analogy with other gender-nonspecific pronominals that had adopted the
same ending to convey an inanimate - for example, MidIE *kWei-se/*kWei-ta
"who/what".
The demonstrative *ta however was already exclusively inanimate and so the
added *-t is redundant here. The earlier stage, ProtoSteppe, appears to have
various demonstratives according to animacy, number and proximity (possibly
something like animate *ki/*si/*a versus inanimate *mi/*ti/*i).
Demonstratives in *s- are seen outside IndoTyrrhenian (cf. Uralic) so, to
claim that *twa: > *so is severly misguided.
And if you're really curious about the ergative, you might wanna try
pondering something more serious like a Nostratic ergative postposition *ma.
Dogolpolsky claims Nostratic *ma is accusative but this cannot be correct
since Nostratic is more likely an ergative language. Bomhard himself doesn't
go into detail about Nostratic grammar. I haven't a clue where you got **-a:
from (Sumerian /-e/ perhaps??). Aside from Sumerian, I see no attestation
for this in Nostratic languages whereas there is plenty of motivation for
ergative *ma. Think it over.
- gLeN
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