Jens:
>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.
Ah, Jens, your cruel and unjust lashings are more pleasurable than those
of any leatherclad dominatrix I know of. Keep up the good work cuz I've
been a bad boy...
>In the counterattack my views are of course being grossly distorted,
Of course. Reality is a gross distortion for some.
>I called attention to the natural inference that this points to the
>presence
>of a feature [+voice] in the nominative marker.
In reference to George Knysh's post on Occam's Razor, a "natural inference"
is not a _necessary_ inference. While *o seems to indicate voicing, the *o
can be from various sources that could be equally valid. The contrast of
*-s and *-d in pronominals however suggests strongly that the origin of
the nominative in *-s, by way of phonetics and grammatical function, derives
from the demonstrative stems *so-, for otherwise we remain stumped on
where *-d comes from... yet it is from *to- quite undeniably.
To reconstruct an otherwise non-existent phoneme **z ignores a more
unavoidable inference of the nominative's origin in favour of an unnecessary
and highly assumptive inference that creates more problems than it solves.
- gLeN
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