Ed states:
>You're being a bit hairsplitting, Glen. -na is the ending in Etruscan to
>form adjectives expressing qualities *possessed by*
>or pertaining to their headwords,
Well, I suppose we should call English /-al/, /-ic/ and /-ese/
"genitive" suffixes as well alongside the genuine /'s/. Call
it hair-splitting if you wish but I haven't seen */Larthena
clenar/ used interchangeably for /Larthal clenar/ yet. Therefore
/-ena/ is not a genitive ending. It is more of a "pertinential"
suffix like the above English suffixes.
>It is quite possible that -na derives from a genitive in Pre-Etruscan,
>[...]
Yes, I don't disagree with a Uralic connection of an original
essive case ending in *-n and I've already mentioned such an
idea previously, additionally in connection with the genitive
plural IE *-�m. I'm just caveating that /-(e)na/ is not
technically a genitive.
The IndoTyrrhenian counterpart would have most likely been
*-ane, I think. In Early LateIE after the final vowels had been
lost, *a became *o, causing *-�n > *-�n. Afterwards, the final
*-n was changed to *-m due to labialisation from *o, as well as
due to its analogical association with the accusative *-m. That
much is solved to my little heart's content.
>while -s and -l may have come from a previous ergative and dative
>respectively
This part is out on a limb because it assumes that IE and Etruscan
both come from an immediate ergative ancestor even though they
themselves are not ergative languages. The likelihood is that
IndoTyrrhenian was _also_ an accusative language and indeed, we
can reconstruct accusative *-m with confidence since they
are present in both languages with this same function (Etruscan -n
and IE *-m). Even, remotely related proto-Uralic has an _accusative_
*-m without any signs of ergativity. This all shows strongly
that even though it probably existed, this much-talked-about
ergative stage entirely predates IE, Etruscan and even
IndoTyrrhenian.
Here's an overview of the functions of the IndoTyrrhenian case
endings like *-se, *-la and *-ane at:
http://glen_gordon.tripod.com/LANGUAGE/NOSTRATIC/STEPPE/indotyr_sound.html
It's open to debate. I have to update the page but the tables near
the top will show you my current thoughts. I'm skeptical of
reconstructing an outright "ergative case" but I'm open to the
idea that these case endings sometimes had ergative-like functions.
Is this what you're thinking?
>You have no proof that the -s and -l endings have anything to do
>with anything in IE.
Since -s is a genitive in Etruscan, its connection with the IE
genitive in *-�s/-�s is fairly blunt, even more so if you
reconstruct earlier stages of IE. The -l case ending is found in
Lydian, for example, as a dative-locative. Any *l-genitive was
obviously on the wane in IE, if not assigned to a related
function.
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gLeNny gEe
...wEbDeVEr gOne bEsErK!
home:
http://glen_gordon.tripod.com
email:
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