From: Marc Verhaegen
Message: 6515
Date: 2001-03-10
>Marc V:my
>>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
>insistence on this lies with the fact that both the *-s nominative and thewhich
>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
>required additional locative postpositions equivalent to "at", "in",Beekes did notice the animate meaning of the nominative -s originally AFAIR.
>"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 *-és. 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