Miguel:
>"I" was never conjugated, it's a pronoun.
I didn't say that. I said, *ego: is built on a verb meaning
"to be here".
>Excuse me? What do you think "here" means if not "close to me"?
I realize where you're going semantically but your theory is
fruitless. Reasons:
a) The reconstructed form of "I" is *ego:, not **eg
b) There is no real-world example of "here" becoming a
first person pronoun afaik, while my equation of *ego:
and /uvanga/ is unavoidable.
Excuse _me_, but your idea remains baseless.
>Inuktikut uvanga apparently contains the 1sg. verbal subject and
>possessive marker -nga (= 1sg. *-k + deictic *-a),
It apparently does. Case closed. Too bad for you.
>We have different Ablaut grades *g^e, *g^o, *g^ (*g^he, *g^ho,
>*g^h). In word final, *-g^ (> *-k^) is attested in [...]
That's beside the point. The *-g- in *ego: is the emphatic
_particle_ (not suffix) which by its nature must have had at
least one syllable as it is ATTESTED! There is no **-g. The
final vowel of the much-used pronoun has simply eroded away in
some languages.
>Etruscan mini, mine, mene (acc. of mi "I") presumably has the same
>accusative morpheme as demonstrative ec-n, et-n. [...] Whether mini
>is *mi-m > *min + deictic -i or the result of a dissimilation *mi-me > mine
>(as in the case of PIE *m�ne), I cannot tell.
While Finnish min� is a nominative, it doesn't mean that the weak
form couldn't have come to be the basis of all case forms in Uralic.
"Presumably" does not mean "certainly", so we may as well leave this
one open. The actual accusative *me of IE is based on the enclitic
form which had no *-n- because it was undeclined.
>Yes, as I said (except the acc. form is actually *n.sm�, derived
>from *mes-m�).
Then how do we get "us" instead of *usme??
>Please explain what possible connection there could be between *-h2a and
>*wei-, and why that's phonetically more plausible than
>my proposal *m� ~ *mu-�y > *w�y ~ *mu-�sW > *m�sW.
Your theory is not plausible by any means because there is no
foundation to what you've built up, let alone the ridiculous
phonetic changes as shown above which are quite obviously bizarre
to any real linguist.
I feel that the origin of *wei and the whole 1pp *-me-/-we-
alternation is very ancient. It stems from a time before
Proto-Steppe when the pronominal system had suppletive forms for
absolutive versus ergative. This is the origin of Steppe's two
sets of distinct verb endings that IE had inherited. The first
person *wei is also an artifact of this old state of affairs
because the original Pre-Steppe pronouns in the 1ps would have
been *mu (ergative) and *?u (absolutive).
In a stage just before Proto-Steppe, *?u came to be agglutinated
to the verb. In Steppe, it had become a full-fledged suffix with
an intervening vowel secondarily placed between the verb stem and
the now consonant-final ending. Thus Steppe intransitive 1ps *-uh
(versus the transitive 1ps *-im).
The plural of Steppe *?u was *wi (merely *?u + plural *-i). So
Steppe *wi became IndoTyrrhenian *wei.
- gLeN
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