Dear Eva,
excuse me for resorting to sarcasm, I have no quarrel with you. The fact
just is your fortuna has landed you squarely in a hornet's nest. We have
been arguing over the finer shades of IE inflectional endings, and when my
opponent quoted "IE ablative *-od" with a short -o- and a voiced *-d I
just had to say, hey, this is not the level we're discussing on. For one
thing the vowel is always long, apparently even disyllabic, and vacillates
between o-timbre (as in Latin) and a-timbre (as in Baltic) and so probably
represents the contracted product of a sequence containing both vowels.
Another thing is that no IE language is capable of showing us whether the
final dental was originally a /-d/ or a /-t/. It is generally put down as
a /-d/, but that is just based on pre-classical Latin (and Oscan) where
final *-t and *-d both give /-d/. The Sanskrit ending of a-stems is /-a:t/
whose consonant alternates in sandhi between /-d/ and /-t/ depending on
whether or not the following word begins with a voiced segment; since
original /-t/ and /-d/ alternate the same, the language is incapable of
telling us which consonant is really at play here. Since my opponent's
point was that the abl. has *-d developed from *-t because it was
unchecked by analogical pressure from word-internal variants, and probably
also that the -o- is a consequence of the putative word-final voicing,
I had to insist that we don't even have these "facts" to ponder over. Of
course I knew he was basing himself on the ablative of Indo-Iranian and
Italic, but I had to object to a preform of precisely the shape *-od.
Jens
On Thu, 22 May 2003, fortuna11111 wrote:
>
> > >What in heaven's name is ablative *-od ?
>
> Skr. -at
>
> I am proud of myself :-)
>
> Eva
>
>
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>