Re: Everything except the kitchen sink

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...>
wrote:

>
> About *wlkWos:
> ----------------------
> I disagree about *wlkWos being assumed, as Jens does, to be older

than

> the process of ablaut that it operates under. There is nothing

showing us

> conclusively that *wlkWos predates the vowel loss. It can stem

just fine

> from the period after vowel loss that precipitated the use of an

accent

> driven ablaut. Period.

> The onus is on Jens to prove that *wlkWos predates vowel loss and

the

> mere appearance of a lost vowel is not sufficient enough to assume

this.

>

Punctuation aside, we are talking about types here. A word-type that
has lost a vowel by syncope must have existed when the syncopation
rule operated. Semicolon.

>
> About the nominative:
> -------------------------------
> The only available possibility for the etymology of *-s and by far

the most

> likely one at that is that it derives from *so. The nominative is

marked

> only in the animate declension and *so is also a demonstrative

used for

> _animate_ functions only. Both phonetics and function coincide.
> Simple reasoning that fails Jens.
>
> Marked nominatives are rare and unstable so we have no license to
> extend a marked nominative infinitely into the past. Another fact

that

> escapes Jens.

What does not escape me is the fact that the nominative is still
marked by /-s/ in Greek, Lithuanian and Latvian, to which its
Icelandic reflex -r could be added. In these languages this terribly
unstable part of the system has not changed since PIE. Sorry, I
forgot I had no license to accept that. Then what should I accept?

> Externally, there is no correlation between IE's marked nominative

and

> the unmarked nominatives of Uralic and EskimoAleut, yet a clear
> relationship for the accusative ending *-m. This emphasizes that

IE's

> marked nominative is surely a very recent innovation. But Jens

can't

> handle this fact either because in his mind, all strong case

endings

> must be created equal (and at the same period of time) simply
> because they are classified under the same name.

I never said that. I have certainly made due distinctions where the
facts demanded so.

>
> So, Jens chooses to promote his **-z solution even though I've
> already justifiably elaborated more than enough times that it is
> undesirable for the most common suffixes to contain a most
> uncommon sound. That it COULD occur is a distracting exercise
> in irrelevant what-ifs. Jens COULD be struck by lightning one day
> so that I no longer have to argue with him about trivial
> commonsense points. Idle possibility and highest probability are
> simply not the same, and Jens therefore continues to be
> unelectrocuted.
>
> So my solution stands as the superior one available thus far.
>
>
> About the aorist
> -----------------------
> But to further nail the coffin in, the aorist is intimately tied to
> this solution. In Jens' crazy solution we have endings for the
> nominative and aorist in **z, both without any clear origin, and
> using an obscenely rare phoneme. As the origin of the
> nominative is quite clear, so too is the origin of the aorist. The
> aorist derives from the verbal derivation of noun stems in *-s-
> which signified a state of action, like an English gerundive
> like English "going".

I guess that's one of the few things about s-aorist theories we now
know to be wrong. The suffixal parts of action-noun s-stems and the
sigmatic aorist are just too different in their morphophonemic
behaviour to be identical.

>
> The lengthening of both the nominative, whether athematic
> or thematic (in re of thematic vowels), and the aorist is unified
> under the process of a secondary loss of vowel, "clipping",
> which affected all newly created *-CV suffixes _after_ the Mid
> IE vowel loss, causing the compensatory lengthening we see.

They would also be unified under a theory ascribing this effect to
their common marker which consists in the sibilant phoneme that
lengthens.

>
> None of these suffixes need to be in **z and it is to our
> disadvantage to insist on this. I can't continue fighting against
> a solution that is so inane as to deny us of an etymology of
> two suffixes in favour of a groundless, improbable phoneme.
>
>
> About *so/*to-
> ---------------------
> There is only one very specific instance of the stem *so-, the
> animate nominative. The rest of the paradigm shows a declined *to-.
> We never see *so- declined with case endings (only the feminine
> ending *-ax). Even the plural uses *to-. Let's accept these facts
> and start from here.
>
> Here's your solution in a nutshell:
> 1. We _assume_ that *so- and *to- are the same word.
> Why?? What shows us that they are?? Pure assumption based on
> nothing.

Hey, it's based on the correct observation that other stems are
inflected all through, and on the similarity between *so- and *to-
in sound and length. That is not zero. Change a feature or two by
whatever rule, and the problem is gone.

>
> 2. We then assume some more that *s & *t alternate initially in
> order to support the above groundless fantasy...
> Why?? There's no evidence of *s/*t alternation initially or even
> medially either! Where is Jens getting his ideas from? Thin air
> obviously.

Medially there is, but I do not invoke that, for *so-/*to- is
special in other respects too.

>
> Two random and baseless assumptions. It's as plain as day.
>
> My solution is as follows:
> 1. We assume that *so was simply an undeclined animate deictic
> added to an already declined paradigm using *to-.
> That's exactly what we see. The stem *so is only used in
> _animate_ functions and is never declined with case endings.
>

This is not a system the language shows us elsewhere, therefore it
is a inane, baseless and groundless as your impression of anything
you believe you have to fight.

>
> Conclusion
> ---------------
> Why is Jens continually fighting the obvious for something that
> takes us on a trippy acid journey through a garden of unlikely
> possibilities underneath the canopy of colourful what-if skies?
> Sure it's a pretty voyage through insanity but that's not what
> theory-making is about. But then, there are two kinds of
> theorists: the idealists and the realists.
>
> I've justified the penultimate accent rule several times but
> Jens turns a deaf ear. This kind of dialogue is like talking to an
> extremist Christian about the irrelevance of worship. He will
> never look at the fact that the Bible is a bundle of self-
> contradiction and that the very act of creation itself is beyond
> logic because faith isn't about logic. Faith is about believing
> despite the odds. This is Jens on PIE.
>
> If "IE was a normal language except where it causes problems"
> then how is a nominative originating from *so (trivial solution),
> over an originless nominative in a rare phoneme **z (bizarre
> solution), a "problem"?
>
> Why does Jens seek problems where there are none?

The defense owes us an account of the status of the form *so. Is
that a stem or a desinence? If it is a stem, why is it uninflected
in the nominative when all other stems do show inflection? If it is
a desinence, what is its stem? Is the nom. accompanying the acc.
*tó-m zero stem + unusually full nominative marker?

The whole problem becomes very small if *so- is accepted as a stem
which is in origin identical with *tó-. That *so- was indeed
perceived as a stem by speakers of the language is proved by the
existence of *sah2. Now, the nominative masculine to which *sah2
would be formed by pure analogy would be expected to be *sos. It is
in fact highly suspicious that the only asigmatic thematic
nominative is *so which has another /s/ already. That invites the
solution that *so is in origin nothing but a dissimilated *so-s.
That, however, is not satisfactory as a nominative to go with acc.
*tó-m (and *tó-/*té- in the entire rest of the paradigm except the
nom.sg.fem.). What we expect is *to-s. I therefore assume that the
least conspicuous analysis is closer to the truth than anything
else, and that makes me assume (but not insist) that the old regular
form *to-s was assimilated to *so-s. Pronouns of third person are
not very stable (though some IE languages still have direct reflexes
of *so), so spontaneous change by assimilation and then
dissimilation would not be very strange, and certainly not
impossible. In that case the irregularity is gone. For the nom.
marker this has the consequence that, whatever its ultimate origin,
it was already fully generalized in animate nominatives at some
stage in the development of PIE. Surely a form *to would have no
impetus to be changed to *so, while *to-s could change to *sos, and
*sos to *so. Thus the original stem of *so was *to, wherefore there
would be no sense in deriving the ending of the older nom. *to-s
from the same stem. By tagging the *-s back on the truncated form
*so we also understand that the form has -o- and not -e-: -o- is the
regular form of the thematic vowel before the once voiced nominative
sibilant.

Jens