Piotr:
>I actually mentioned *ec^wa- or *ac^wa- (with an initial vowel).
Yes, that's what I said, but it seems that my "accent aigue" didn't
survive the email transfer and was dropped without my expressed
consent >:( Let's try this again: *e'c^wa-.
>Proto-Indo-Iranian stress was a matter of pitch rather than
>expiratory strength, [...]
I realise that as well. Even so, I would imagine a high pitch
to be more audible than a low one. The high pitch is still on the
initial vowel and the low one is on the second vowel.
>(I also mentioned the possibility or reanalysis).
Elaborate. What possible reanalysis are you speaking of? I suppose
if I were an AA speaker listening to a speaker of a Satem dialect
say *ec^was, I'd probably hear it as **a-c^wase with a
demonstrative marker *a- attached.
But still, the nominative or accusative, even the locative, would
be most usually heard with the stem *ec^wa- and you'd think that
this would be fused to the AA loan. The vowels don't even match
either. How does *[a] become *[&] when AA speakers could surely
have told the difference?
>The final *-s of the nom.sg. is just an inflection, not part of
>the stem and may have been ignored by the borrowers, especially
>if they were aware of the existence of other case forms (*ac^wa-m,
>*ac^wa-i, etc.).
Yes, I thought of that. However, I start thinking about French and
all the examples of words borrowed into English complete with
attached foreign inflections even though there were probably some
who understood French grammar at the time of the borrowing to
know better:
Eng. /render/ < Fr. /rendre/ ("Je rends")
Eng. /revere/ < Fr. /re^ver/ ("Je re^ve")
Or how about French /chewing gum/ and /shampooing/ complete with
English /-ing/. Next on my bag of linguistic goodies is Japanese /shoppingu/
"shopping" and /sukiingu/ "skiing". There's
also my example-for-all-occasions, *septm, which shows
Semitic grammar permanently fused to the IndoEuropean stem.
And don't forget Finnish /porsas/. Gee, I wonder where that *-s
is from if it was truely "weakened" like you say... hehehe.
It seems like it's more common for a language to borrow a
complete inflected word rather than a stem, otherwise we're
talkin' some heavy duty bilingualism here.
>It's also possible that the articulation of the final *-s was
>weakened at least in some positions (also before a pause) already
>in Proto-Indo-Iranian (as it is was in the oldest Iranian and Indo-Aryan).
Finnish and I had a chat and she tells me that the *-s isn't
as "weak" as you suggest:
porsas "pig"
taivas "heaven"
marras "dead"
Finnish also has many examples of a fused IE nominative in other
loans:
hammas "tooth"
kuningas "king"
ruhtinas "prince"
So if every other language borrows words complete with inflection,
why is Abkhaz-Adyghe so special??
- love gLeN
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