Mark O:
>Anyway. At the bottom of this post is the question of why IE has
>grammatical number in the first place (I think Glen would say
>it's inherited from Nostratic).
Zzzzzzz..... {snort}... What? Did somebody call?
I don't know what you're talking about, Mark. I assume that
when you say "grammatical number", you are refering to the whole
singular-dual-plural thing in IE. No, I don't think all of it
was inherited from Nostratic at all.
I think that Proto-Steppe was not as concerned with these classifications as
Late IE was. Proto-Steppe was agglutinative
and Late IE was synthetic. I date the "dual" only to Late Mid IE
(*after* 5500 BCE) and derives mostly from analogy with the numeral
two. Both *-u and *-ix derive from *dwo:u and *dwix. The plural
suffix *-es appears to derive from Steppe *-it and there appears
to be another plural suffix *-i, at least for pronouns and
demonstratives. I don't know where Steppe *-it comes from exactly,
but *-i would seem to be of Nostratic origin. A "singulative"
suffix *-n might exist in Steppe as well, but appears to be
derived from the singular oblique pronouns (*mu/*mun-, *tu/*tun-).
There. Are you happy now?
- love gLeN
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