About *wlkWos
----------------------
Jens:
>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.
As I said, there is naturally a period of accent-based ablaut AFTER the
syncope (and apocope) caused zerograding, naturally causing further
zerograding AFTER that event.
No, your statement is clearly false. So *wlkWos DID NOT NECESSARILY
exist when the "syncopation rule" operated. The onus is still in your
court to extend the date of this word further back in time by means
of further proof that this "must" be so.
>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.
Three out of a thousand languages. Wow!
You're once again twisting probabilities to suit your unlikely theory.
The well-known linguistic fact remains: A marked nominative is unstable.
Aorist
--------
>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.
Their differing morphophonemic behaviour is irrelevant and fully
explainable.
The *s-aorist was adapted solely from the strong case form of these
noun stems and wouldn't have the *s/*t alternation seen in nouns. On
the other hand, the lengthening by the s-aorist is caused by the syllabic
reshaping and shortening of verb stems in CVCVC- to CVCC- (*bHer-&s-
>*bHe:r-s-) and wouldn't have affected noun stems. Their different
behaviours reflect the divergeant evolutionary paths of nouns and verbs
in Late IE.
>They would also be unified under a theory ascribing this effect to
>their common marker which consists in the sibilant phoneme that
>lengthens.
As I already said over and over, **z is unlikely to be used so extensively
for the commonest morphemes when it doesn't exist elsewhere. There
is no intuitive reason why **z should lengthen preceding vowels either.
I can't stress enough how assumptive this theory is.
Your idea loses far more than it gains.
About *so/*to-
---------------------
>>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.
Amateur linguistics. Any linguist knows "similarity" isn't evidence. Nuff
said.
>> 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.
Medially isn't initially, so I rest my case. And even in "medial" positions,
this alternation is caused by their being originally final, proven by
the 2pp *-te which does not show any sibilantization, yet is medial
and surely ancient.
The sibilantization of *t occurs very early, that much is self-evident,
(in IndoTyrrhenian) and it occurs before weak case suffixes were even
attached to noun stems.
>>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.
Aha! Firm proof that your views are offcenter.
Anybody who has any amateur inkling of IE whatsoever will know that
the paradigm of English "to be" is a merger of *bHeu- (be, been), *es-
(am, is, are) and *wes- (was, were). Now, how can one possibly
answer your misguided question above if we exchange *so/*to for
"be/am/was" and "IE" for "English"?
Point is, we can't seriously respond to an inane question as this.
As with IE, English doesn't "show us elsewhere" such a system. It's
a one-time event; It happens. So therefore, by your logic, English is
inane, I suppose.
>Now, the nominative masculine to which *sah2 would be formed
>by pure analogy would be expected to be *sos.
No it wouldn't. The adoption of *so into the *to-paradigm occured
at the same period of time as the adoption of the marked
nominative. So *so fails to be explicitly marked by *-s because
it occurs during the adoption of this marker.
Another reason is that it would be both phonetically and
grammatically redundant. It would be like saying "this-this" or "thith"
instead of just "this".
And did I not mention that *so was UNdeclined and that the feminine
*sax is not from the earliest animate-inanimate stage of IE? The
feminine has no bearing here and so *so is quite clearly undeclined.
>What we expect is *to-s. I therefore assume that [...] the old regular
>form *to-s was assimilated to *so-s.
I will turn the tables on your double-standard thinking: "This is not a
system the language shows us elsewhere, therefore it is an inane,
baseless and groundless as your impression of anything you believe you
have to fight."
We do not see this assimilation elsewhere nor is it an inevitable
conclusion.
Yes we do expect *to-s, but it was replaced by _another_ _seperate_
stem, the undeclined *so -- A more straightforward self-evident theory
because we don't need to further explain why *so has no *-s, or why it
has *o (It simply does), or why **tos assimilated in this one special and
highly speculative case.
Conclusion
---------------
Jens continues to respond with unfocused rebuttals, full of double
standards, half-truths, probability-twisting and a penchant for the
more absurd over the mundane. Will it end? Stay tuned next post...
- gLeN
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