Re: [tied] Re: Pronouns again

> Jens: [...]
>>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.

> I would have guessed that the Aleut ending shows the original state of
> affairs and that -a has been secondarily added to Inuktitut -nga.

Sure, that's one of the two possibilities I spelt out in the mail you're
replying to. It's the only one I have published. Nice to know it's the
better one.

>>It begins fine: [...] But can *-g^ mean 'I'?
>
> No. The interpretation of *-g- as an already existant emphatic particle
> is logically sufficient, as opposed to an idle connection with PEskimo
> *-ka.

Well, many things are logically sufficient without being true. There are
often *many* posibilities. Even so, I fail to see the idleness of
highlighting the similarity between Eskimo {'there' + -k} and PIE {'there'
+ -g^} both meaning 'I'. Most true cognates look less similar.

>>The PIE morpheme corresponding to Esk. -nga (or *-k) is *-H2,
>
> While I agree with this connection, there are approximately some 6000 to
> 8000 years of prehistoric development to explain for both language
> families. It would seem to me that Proto-Boreal, ancestral to EskimoA,
> CKam, Yukaghir and Uralic, would have had two distinct 1ps endings
> marking subjective and objective: *-m and *-N.

Was there not a *-K also? I find it much harder to find an *-N.

>>Could the front vowel have palatalized the old velar?
>
> The *g^ in PIE is not palatalized. It's a plain velar. It is only
> palatalized in later satem dialects.

The three PIE velar series which are not in complementary distribution in
any arrangement. There is no way they can have been created secondarily
after the dissolution of the protolanguage.

> Plus, I feel that *eg- was in fact a _verb_ signifying "to be here",
> which is the reason for the enclitic *ge which served merely as a filler
> consonant to go between the stem and the pronominal ending *-o:.

The *-o: is only found in Italic and Greek; a number of other languages
point to a shorter form, in fact to exactly what remains if we leave out
the *-o: of ego:. That makes it unattractive to locate the message "first
person pronoun" in this part. Alas, I am not endowed with a sense to make
me feel which part of a word means what. There may be others of my kind;
could you teach us your tricks?

>>Inflected forms 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.
>
> Was there not an athematic, non-indicative 1ps *-m? How did that get
> waved away?

It did not, I explicitly conceded that this item does not fit the picture.
It all boils down to the question whether what looks like three series (1)
*-k/*-m-, (2) *-k/*-m-, (3) *-m/*-m- can be assumed to reflect a single
series *-k/*-m-, with paradigmatic levelling being responsible for the *-m
of (3).

>>It may be noted that PIE has other cases of an interchange of /m/ and
>> /H2/. One could cite the roots *gWem- and *gWeH2- 'come, go' [...]
>> there are also *drem-/*dreH2- 'run' and another *drem-/*dreH2- 'sleep'.

> Given that there are many other verbs with an optional *-H2-, I think
> not.

I see no basis for this statement. What exactly is it that you do not think?

Jens