--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...>
wrote:
>
> But, Rob, what stage of IE are you speaking of? Since we are
> dealing with preIE here, I have no recourse other than to speak
> from what I know of Nostratic and I must say that the accusative
> *-m is widespread, occuring in Uralic and Altaic. It is surely an
> old case suffix. So the object was indeed marked for the longest
> time. You are speaking about the lack of marking of the inanimate
> object but this, as I've said, was remedied with partial ergativity.
To my knowledge, Altaic does not have an accusative in -m, but
rather -i, which could be related to the PIE dative. However, your
point still stands at least regarding Uralic, which has accusative -m
and (to our knowledge) an unmarked nominative. One possibility for
this state of affairs is that *-ma was not an accusative marker
before PIE and Uralic separated, but rather a locative(-ish) case or
something similar. After PIE and Uralic diverged from each other,
both proto-languages came to use *-m(a) as an accusative case at some
point. The fact that -m often has accusative meaning does not
necessarily mean that -m was always accusative, but rather that it
was an element of the proposed parent language (Nostratic?) and that
its subsequent case function was one that could be easily construed
into an accusative role.
> Now granted, you might be thinking, "Well, if you agree in partial
> ergativity then why can't you accept the nominative coming
> from the genitive". Here are the points that you need to explain
> away before we can accept your idea:
>
> - Explain pronominal inanimate *-d which contrasts
> with animate *-s (eg: *kWis versus *kWid)
> (You've been ignoring this point all along.)
Certainly. I did say the following in my previous post: "Inanimate
nouns, being incapable of action, were never expressed as
grammatical subjects; the closest they could come to those was to
take the ablative/instrumental case (to form an 'oblique subject')."
Apparently this has been insufficient. What I meant was exactly what
you meant in an earlier post regarding "by X," with X being an
inanimate noun. This is exactly what I meant in the quoted sentence
above. Let's review the proposed semantics, which are very different
from modern Indo-European languages, but can still make sense. The
genitive was the case of origin, expressing "of" or "from" -- thus
possessive constructions were possible ("the dog of me" = "my dog").
I posit that the future ablative and instrumental cases were in
origin one case, for which I use the former name. This ablative case
expressed "motion/action from X," from which instrumental
constructions were possible. However, the ablative was not a case of
origin, and that's the important thing. Now let's tie this in with
the concepts of animacy and inanimacy. Animate nouns are capable of
independent action; thus, it can be said that actions can originate
from animate nouns. Inanimate nouns, on the other hand, are
incapable of independent action. So, they can never take the role of
transitive subject (i.e., originator/initiator of an action). The
closest role to that which they can assume is an instrumental one.
Also, the verb would have to be passive (or otherwise non-direct), as
you yourself point out.
Now, we have a potentially complex state of affairs at a hypothesized
early stage of PIE, where the following occurred:
1. Animate transitive subjects were marked with the genitive case.
2. Inanimate nouns could not be used as transitive subjects, but
could be approximated as such using the ablative case, and with the
verb in a passive (or otherwise non-direct) form.
3. Transitive objects, when acted upon by animate agents, took a
locative-ish case in *-m(a); when "acted upon" by inanimate "agents,"
they took no marking (since they actually weren't transitive objects
in such cases).
Let me try to illustrate using "traditional" PIE, with some slight
modifications:
Ekwos wirom egwhenet. (The) horse killed (the) man.
Ekwos kwim egwhenet? What did (the) horse kill?
Wiro gwhen(e)ti. (The) man kills.
Kwid wiro egwhenetor? By what was (the) man killed?
Wiro gwhenetor. (The) man is killed.
Apologies if the use of verbal inflections above is not entirely
correct. But I think you all will see what I'm saying here.
> - Explain why *-s is solely animate, never inanimate
> (You did do this in part but your views are in
> opposition to the idea of ergative sentences with
> inanimate agent and hence destroys the last
> possible link between the nominative and genitive.)
Again, *-s is solely animate because *-s was originally a genitive
marker and thus the case of origin, and animate nouns were the only
ones capable of originating actions.
> Hopefully, this will discourage you and you'll accept all my own
> theories... bwahahaha!
LOL.
> But I don't think you are in full realization of the large time
frames
> you're dealing with. The "ergative" stage of IE is so far into the
> past that it's hard to debate it seriously through IE alone. It's
like
> discussing IE's inanimate gender through English examples.
I understand what you mean. However, no other language group, to my
knowledge, has a sigmatic nominative. This means that either there
were other PIE-ish dialects that co-existed with PIE and then
disappeared without a trace, or that the sigmatic nominative was a
relatively late innovation.
> Please explain inanimate nominoaccusative *-d in pronominals.
I think I did, see above. :D
> But go on. I like your big-picture thinking.
Thanks, I intend to.
- Rob