Marc V:
>AFAIR, Beekes believes the nominative (= old ergative?) -s could >derive
>from genitive -s. Many languages use the genitive for >expressing the actor
>in passive sentences (eg, German "von") or in >ergative languages. Could
>that be a possible explanation IYO?
No, I wholeheartedly oppose this suggestion here. I'm very satisfied with
deriving the nominative from the demonstrative *se. The strong reason for my
insistence on this lies with the fact that both the *-s nominative and the
particle *se are used for _animate_ nouns. Beekes has obviously failed to
understand the _animate_ meaning of the ending (and I must underline
_animate_ one more time). The *-s is more appropriately to be named an
_animate_ nominative because it serves the needs of _animate_ nouns which,
being _animate_, require _animate_ endings like *-s.
Inanimate words appear in the nomino-accusative case either without ending
or terminating with a dental stop, as in the case of interrogative and
demonstrative stems like *kWei-t (or *kWei-d, if you wish). The latter fact
supports all the more the idea that both demonstrative particles *se
(animate) and *to (inanimate) were indeed suffixed to an originally bare
noun stem (check out the opposition: *kWei-s vs. *kWei-t). The apparently
late crystalization of locative endings like *-i appear to add further to
the suspicion that bare noun stems existed in the past.
So, in some vague pre-IE stage ... let's call it "Early Mid IE" and let's
say that it was spoken between 6000 and 5500 BCE ... the bare noun stem
would have functioned as an "oblique", an unmarked case other than
accusative, genitive, ablative, etc. The oblique could express the animate
subject and inanimate object (the nominative) as well as relationships which
required additional locative postpositions equivalent to "at", "in",
"beside", etc.
In all, I fail to understand how this brainwave of Beekes is as thorough in
explaining the special animate sense given to the IE nominative *-s... not
to mention why the accent and vowels differ between the similar endings
known as the nominative singular *-s, the nominative plural *-es and the
genitive singular *-�s. The first kneejerk reaction is to desire to connect
the three very different endings together. But, trust me, such an
undertaking is more complicated than it looks and is ultimately hopeless
because they aren't connected at all.
Deep Thoughts #4203:
People can look alike without being related.
- gLeN
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