Re: [tied] number of cases in PIE

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003 16:55:19 +0100 (MET), Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
<jer@...> wrote:

>Anybody got an idea as to what underlies Latin local adverbs in -inc 'from
>...' and in -u:c 'to ...' (hinc, illinc 'form here, there' : hu:c, illu:c
>'to here, there')? They look like older cases, but which ones? The forms
>in -inc resemble in-de 'from there' which has un-de 'from where' with
>coloration from the (lost) labiovelar beside it matching OCS koNde^, koNdu
>'from where'. The vocalism is as with ibi : ubi and Skt. iha : kuha. Much
>of this must be of PIE date, but with what status?

I'll have a think about it...

>As for the classical eight cases, it looks as if the "strong cases"
>without (original) vowels in their endings make up a basic core, being
>simply the nominative and accusative (and the unmarked vocative which may
>not be called a case at all since it enters into no sentence structure).

Despite some formal differences (i/u-stems, o-stems), I would lump the
vocative together, at least from a historical point of view, with the
neuter Nom/Acc (and with a pronominal form like *ey [e.g. Skt. ay-am,
Slav. ins. *ey-mi > imI], formally an i-stem vocative, which occurs
alongside nom. *is, acc. *im).

>Another surprising thing with the personal pronouns is to find that the
>accusative ends, not simply in *-m, but in *-mé (to which the endings are
>added in the weak cases). I have no idea what the final accented /-e/ is
>meant to express. It may be a simple prop-vowel, for all other forms of
>the personal pronouns are vocalized before the final consonant and so end
>in only a single consonant; then, if the acc. was formed by adding /-m/ to
>the nom., the result would be a word ending in two consonants. However, I
>am not familiar with any other instance where an accented vowel is being
>added simply to avoid a final cluster.

In my analysis the *-e is a stem-final vowel, therefore a thematic
vowel, which is not dropped even when unaccented (A. *twé, G. *téwe).
The morpheme *-me (*-we) is is of course related to the nominal acc.
*-m, the difference being that *-m was agglutinated at an earlier
stage.

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