Re: [tied] Nominative: A hybrid view

OK, I'm jumping right into the middle of this discussion. I'm no
expert on PIE or historical linguistics in general, but I have read a
thing or two about both subjects.

I'm gonna take this from the beginning, since that seems to be
easiest for me. Proto-Indo-European, based on all
attested "immediate" daughter languages, had a marked nominative
(i.e., a non-zero morpheme marked the grammatical subject). By all
accounts, this most likely was the result of an earlier ergative-
absolutive system, where the transitive subject was overtly marked,
and the transitive object and intransitive subject were not.
Furthermore, the genitive and nominative singular suffixes are very
closely related; closely enough, in fact, for one to posit that they
are actually one and the same. This seems to make sense -- a
grammatical system that had no way of distinguishing subject and
object, other than position (word-order), would likely begin marking
subjects with another case form whose semantics are sufficient to be
used as a transitive subject indicator. In my opinion (and many
others, it seems), the genitive would be such a case form, because it
was not only the case of possession, but also denoted origin,
separation, etc. Because it had multiple meanings, it could rather
easily extend itself to indicating transitive subjects. When this
new state of affairs was reached, the narrative effect would be
something like this: "of/from-horse dog it-killed" for "(the) horse
killed (the) dog." Thus, I believe that the PIE nominative was
originally an ergative case, which came from the PIE genitive.

Another piece of evidence to support this theory is that only the o-
stem (or "thematic") declension added to the genitive form later on,
with -osio or something similar (which would be properly analyzed as -
o-s-io). Where the -io comes from, I'm not sure; but it appears to
be related to adjectives in -io. However, while this is all well and
good for the o-stems, there seems to be a problem conforming this
with the reconstructed paradigm for root nouns. They have a
nominative singular in -s (appended directly to the root, as in *reg-
s) and a genitive singular in -os. Any possible explanations for
this?

I think part of this reconciliation problem deals with the contrast
between o-stems, both animate and inanimate, and all other stems. I
believe that the original contrast was between vowel-stems (later o-
stems) and consonant-stems (including i- and u-stems, which were
originally y- and w-stems). It appears that all consonant-stems had
the ergative -s directly appended to the stem, and then had a
genitive in -os. With the vowel-stems, both were initially the same
(before the genitive sg. became -osio). I posit that the so-
called "thematic vowel" of the o-stems appeared because of the
genitive (and probably other cases as well); I'll leave discussion
regarding how it appeared to later. The fact that Latin and Greek
have o-stem vocatives in -e seems to be indicative of the earlier
state of affairs.

Finally, the -d ending of inanimate pronouns (and nouns?) is
descended directly from the ablative (and/or instrumental). If the
ablative was indeed -Vd, likely -ad, then there was a definite
relationship between that case and the preposition *ad. If so, then
this points to an earlier state of affairs where PIE (or its presumed
ancestor) had postpositions instead of prepositions.

That's all for right now, just wanted to put my two cents in.

- Rob