Re: [tied] Re: PIE grammar (5) -- I wish it were simpler

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 7318
Date: 2001-05-14

On Sat, 12 May 2001 20:30:22 +0100, "petegray"
<petegray@...> wrote:

>> My guess is that the *-r and *-m were originally avoided in the second
>> and first person respectively, precisely because they were,
>> respectively, second and first person markers.
>
>*-m is clearly a first person marker, but I can't remember *-r being a
>second person marker in PIE. What do you mean?

To my knowledge, dative personal agreement markers have never been
reconstructed for PIE at all, so if they once existed (in pre-PIE
rather than PIE), they might be different from the established subject
personal markers (we have two sets of them: *-m, *-s, *-t and *-h2,
*-th2, *-0). As final *-r can come from pre-PIE **-r as well as **-n,
my own conjecture would be that the origin is actually **-n (cf. the
Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut second person sg. marker *-t ~ *-n). The
Hittite 3sg. present middle form <wara:ni> "it burns" (<wara:nu> "let
it burn") is usually explained as dissimilated from expected
*<wara:ri> (*<wara:ru>), but, alternatively, it may be explained as a
case where **-n > *-r failed to take place in the vicinity of *-r-.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...