Hello, Brian, nice going, but you may as well talk to the waves. I am the
culprit of this because I noticed something about the IE animate
nominative morpheme of a phonological nature which for some reason did not
fit into a series of preconceived ideas hatched by our mutual friend.
In the counterattack my views are of course being grossly distorted, as I
am sure whatever you may want to add will also be. I had the audacity to
inform those interested of my impression of what little things about the
nom. ending I believed I could see. And, since the thematic vowel, which
can be argued to alternate e/o depending on the lack or presence of
voicing in the following segment, produces a nominative *-o-s (not *-e-s),
I called attention to the natural inference that this points to the
presence of a feature [+voice] in the nominative marker. The observation
of course only applies to the time when the voice-governed rule
differentiating the thematic vowel operated, which must be some undefined
prestage of the protolanguage. For the chronological layer of the final
phase of the IE unity, I like others see only a single sibilant phoneme
/s/, but I do not believe anybody has the authority to forbid it from
having more than a single source in a longer time perspective. In our
friend's report this becomes
> Jens wants to reconstruct a nominative infinitely into a preIE
> past and to invent a new phoneme **z [...]
meant to underscore the point that I am taking the presence of the marked
nominative too far back in time. Now, nobody knows how far back this would
have to take us, for we are operating with relative chronological steps
only. Be it long or short, the form in *-os is evidence of one-time
voicing here, if things are not *much* more complicated than this would
make it (they could of course well be). There seems to be no objection to
the working of the nom. marker in producing lengthening before it
disappeared in forms like *p&2-te':r 'father' from an underlying form in
*-ter-s (or, if the voicing idea is right, rather *-ter-z). Surely that
must antedate some of the ablaut also, so I can't really see the
justification for the big, big difference with which this is being treated
as opposed to my suggestion about the innocent sibilant. As a trumpcard I
am being served the dogma of "instability" in a marked nominative. It
appears that nominative marking, being normally redundant, is
typologically uncommon and so cannot be expected to survive for very long,
and, see for yourself, where are they today? Therefore anything I say
about a nominative marker over and above a certain age is dismissed as
nonsense. Now, nobody knows whether I am really overstepping the line, for
nobody knows of any criteria for where to draw it. And don't think it
makes the situation any better that you can point out that all IE branches
except Armenian and Albanian have retained it down to the time of their
actual attestations. If you believe that the fact that the marker survived
from the protolanguage down to Latin and Gothic and even present-day
Lithuanian and Greek gives you enough license to assume that is could also
have existed some time before the protolanguage disintegrated, forget it,
you are just liable to get a verbal slop pail emptied over your head. I
also thought about bringing in Old French, but I guessed that it would
only be construed to show that the nominative could not survive (although
for quite some time it apparently could), so I only pointed to a number of
modern IE languages that still have it. It was like fighting fire with
gasoline, as you may have seen. Our friend marshalled his big brother
Ockey who apparently has a principle saying that his kid brother is always
right. The principle is something about simplicity, according to which we
are not to expect to be seeing more in a picture just because we look at
it at a closer range.
Quite fortunately the facts don't seem to care much about the principles
they are being lectured about. So there still appears to be room for good
objective observation and sound reasoning over the established data. Nice
that there are still some who do just that.
Jens
On Thu, 15 May 2003, Glen Gordon wrote:
>
> Brian:
> >But Old French kept the nominative marker in the main class
> >of masculine nouns longer than it kept any of the other
> >case-marking (e.g., nom.sing. <murs>, obl.sing. <mur>, from
> >Latin <mu:rus>). So, I believe, did Provençal, both
> >continuing a feature of late spoken Latin.
>
> Yes, yes, yes, Brian, that's lovely. Why, you're just a walking
> encyclopaedia of knowledge. Too bad this has little to do with
> what I'm trying to say.
>
> So what if Old French shows such a thing? Is this the linguistic
> norm? Not from what I can tell. You probably had to scratch
> your head really hard to come up with that trivia.
>
> A marked nominative is like a marked present or like toast
> without butter. It's just odd for the default form of any system
> to be marked. Why am I fighting something already accepted?
>
> My point is that we shouldn't jump to reconstruct oddness
> unless there is ample reason to do so. In IE, there is ample
> reason to reconstruct primary and secondary endings even
> though it might seem to stray from the norm for a present
> to be marked. (Of course we've already talked about this
> and the other interpretations of these endings.)
>
> Jens wants to reconstruct a nominative infinitely into a preIE
> past and to invent a new phoneme **z, but I'm saying that
> we need a whole lotta justification to do so because a
> marked nominative IS odd. Sure it happens and sure it
> obviously needs to be reconstructed in IE itself, but there is
> some point at which it was created and I can't see that point
> being very remote in the past for the number of reasons that
> I've already mentioned, including the commonsense origin of
> that ending (from a demonstrative as evidenced by *-s/*-d
> opposition).
>
> You can all join Jens' **z camp if all I care but I'm going to
> join another camp. It's called Camp Reasoning. It's fun. We
> should all go there one day :)
>
>
> - gLeN
>
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