The Eskimo part is another point where I agree with Glen. In an earlier
posting Glen paraphrased the original meaning of ego as "and then there's
me", and I believe it can be proved that that is exactly the underlying
meaning of Eskimo *u-a-nga. It does not matter what kind of Eskimo you
take, there is a regular reflection of that form all the way from Siberia
to Greenland.
The first part /u-a/ consists itself of two stems: 1. u-, a pronoun of the
deixis "at hand", meaning the directing in which the speaker is pointing,
the thing he is pointing at, or the fact he is calling to mind. 2. /-a/
which appears to have some meaning of emphasis, since it occurs in all the
emphatic adverbs of pointing, as /qamm-a/ 'look inside!', 'get in!, 'Oh,
it's in there!' from the root qam- + -a with emphatic gemination. The
geminated form is the form all deictic stems assume when they are used
without further suffixes. With the addition of a morpheme such as the loc.
-ni we get ungeminated qama-ni 'inside'. The unextended form made from u-
has the form /uww-a/ with gemination of the automatic glide, meaning (in
Greenlandic) 'look here, well, nevertheless'. When extensions are added
the stem takes the form ua-, as ua-ni 'here, there (as indicated)'.
The second part is as in the intransitive verb, e.g. takuvu-nga 'I see /
saw', apparently an elaboration of takuvuq 'he/she sees / saw' which must
be an old active participle (*taku-puR 'seeing') in predicative use. The
same ending is used as object marking, as 3sg + 1sg takuvaanga 'he sees /
saw me' based on a passive participle (*taku-paR-a + -nga 'his seen one
[am] I', 'he has seen me').
Thus u-a- indeed means 'here (is)', and -nga means 'I, me'. Combined they
mean 'me voici'.
The ending -nga is undoubtedly related to the 1sg possessive marker *-ka.
The nucleus must be the /k/ which, by general rule, would be nasalized in
word-final position (its Aleut counterpart is in fact -ng). I have had
grave trouble making out why there is nasalization also in the
intransitive ending -nga. Perhaps the -a was here added after word-final
nasalization, or perhaps the rule of nasalization should be extended to
include whatever is special about this case (cliticization?). This
particular point remains unsettled, but the elements involved are rather
obviously the same as in other cases of marking of the inactive person.
Now, it would be a nice parallel if the same analysis could be made for
Lat. ego and its congeners, for which the PIE reconstruction seems to be
*(H1)eg^. It begins fine: *e- (or *H1e-) could well be the locative 'in
it, there, then' (identical with the augment, but rather with a meaning of
location). But can *-g^ mean 'I'? The PIE morpheme corresponding to Esk.
-nga (or *-k) is *-H2, marking the inactive 1sg (middle voice and
perfect). The truth is of course we don't know, for we have no completely
parallel cases to go by. Could the front vowel have palatalized the old
velar? Has sandhi sonorized it in legato speech? And was it perhaps even a
stop to begin with? The fun seems to have stopped by now, for these
questions cannot be answered (at least not in the affirmative) on the
basis of material from IE itself. This is a point where IE is humbly
waiting for Nostratic analysis to shape up.
Inflected form of 'I' begin with *m- in IE. Curiously, also the forms of
the dual and plural reflect /m/ (in part changed to /w/ by rule, and in
part apparently dissimilated to /n/ which looks more like a spontaneous
event). In none of these cases is the consonant in word-final position.
Likewise in Eskimo-Aleut, we have 1sg *-k, but 1du *-m-g, 1pl *-m-d
(yielding PEsk. *-puk, *-put resp.). Even in the IE middle and perfect,
the -m- (-w-) recurs outside the singular, just as in Esk.-Aleut. Even
despite the contrary evidence of the active 1sg in *-m, this looks very
much like an old alternation conditioned by position. Are we dealing with
an old phoneme which became *-k in word-final position, but yielded *(-)m-
elsewhere?
It may be note that PIE has other cases of an interchange of /m/ and /H2/.
One could cite the roots *gWem- and *gWeH2- 'come, go' (combined to a
paradigm in Greek baino:, eba:n); there are also *drem-/*dreH2- 'run' and
another *drem-/*dreH2- 'sleep'. Could the form with /H2/ be pausa
variants? The alternation would not be *very* different from Old Norse
springa, prt. sprakk (with -kk < *-nk < *-ng). Still, it would demand
something like a labiovelar nasal, and thus does not look particularly
appealing.
I guess there are a few camels to be swallowed before ego and uanga are
made out to be isomorphic, but the Eskimo side of the question is clear
enough.
Jens
On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Glen Gordon wrote:
>
> Torsten:
> >And how would you assess an attempt to relate it to Canadian Inuit,
> >prof. Gordon?
>
> Prof. Gordon, eh? Anyways, I think you're refering to the "relationship"
> of IE *ego: to Inuktitut /uvanga/ that I brought up earlier. The
> connection was only semantic. I didn't mean that these two forms are
> actually related. Simply that both 1ps pronouns, /uvanga/ and *ego:,
> yield the same sort of literal translation, "My being here", and that
> they are pieced together in a similar manner (/uva-/ "here" + /-nga/ "I"
> versus *e(-ge) "here" + *-o: "I").
>
> In the end, though, the two pronouns formed seperately.
>
>
> - gLeN
>
>
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