Re: Accusative *-m

--- In cybalist@egroups.com, "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:

>
> I said:
> >>To explain the IE reflexes as independent nasalization is far more
> >>extravagant than the consensus solution.
>
> Torsten:
> >Independent? Of what?
> >A thought experiment: All Romance langauges become extinct. You

find

> >a Portuguese inscription sg. homem, pl homens. Now reconstruct the
> >root. That will of course be *homem- (you have no chance of knowing
> >the h- is mute). The -ns of the plural will "in all likelihood" be
> >derived from -ms.
>
> The thought experiment failed because it is irrelevant to our

actual

> knowledge of IE languages or even languages in general. We know

ALOT more

> than Portuguese so one need not pull a blanket over everyone. There

are many

> diverse IE languages where *-m is found as is (eg: Latin, Sanskrit)

and this

> just couldn't be the case unless the accusative was *-m to begin

with (not

> *n, not *a~, not silent *q or *e). So we are forced to reconstruct

*-m for

> the accusative because anything else would be needlessly more

complex and it

> wouldn't follow known sound laws as well. What exactly are you

suggesting?

> Do you want *a~ instead? What exactly?
>
> - gLeN
>
>

I understand that the thought experiment failed because it doesn't
correspond to the actual situation. That's true. And on that account
all thought experiments would be failures.
Actually I was asking a question. Making a suggestion would have been
the next thing after I received an answer.
-m is found in Sanskrit. I vaguely recollect that it's weak there,
one way or the other.
Latin -m disappears in poetry, according to the metric rules; where
word-final and word-initial vowel meet (cf. "La donna-é mobile"!)
Suppose you were the first to write down a language, and that
language had nasal vowels that behaved like the Polish ones ~V -> Vn
in certain contexts. Would you choose the nasal or the vowel plus n
(or m) as the basic form?

Torsten