Re: [tied] Nominative: A hybrid view

On Mon, 26 May 2003 01:14:15 +0200 (MET DST), Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
<jer@...> wrote:

>On Sat, 24 May 2003, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> As far as I know, in the whole of Balto-Slavic the original
>> o-stem/pronominal PIE genitive (*-osyo; *esyo, *tosyo) only survived
>> in the single Slavic form *kWesyo > OCS c^eso "of what?". (Modern
>> Slavic lgs. have generally normalized this to c^ogo or c^ego, but
>> Slovenian still has c^ésa).
>
>It is also the form of the genitive of pronouns in Old Prussian: stas
>'that, the' has gen.sg. stessei or stesse (also steise and once steises),
>ains 'one' has gen.sg. ainassei or ainessa. Trautmann explains the form
>from *-e/osyo with or without added deictic -i.

Ok.

>This supports the
>impression that the BSl. gen.sg. of pronouns is from the IE genitive, not
>from the ablative.

The Lithuanian (tõ) pronominal genitive is certainly an old ablative.

>This speaks against an attempt to unite Slavic -ogo
>with -a and Lith. -o (from circumflex long a) and rather favors a
>derivation from the IE genitive which is well known. The stem of 'what' in
>Slavic reflects *ki- and *ke-, while that of 'who' reflects *ku- and *ko-
>(all earlier labiovelar of course). Therefore OCS kogo, which is directly
>opposed to a neuter c^eso, would be expected so somehow reflect *kWoso as
>opposed to *kWeso (taking these to be reduced variants of *kWosyo/
>*kWesyo). Now, c^eso is phonetically regular, but kogo looks like nothing
>we know. I have ventured the guess that it is analogical on c^eso which
>was perceived of having two related consonants, the second of which was a
>reduced form of the initial; therefore, if the second consonant of *koso
>is replaced by a weak form of k-, the result cannot be very different from
>kogo. So I suggest that that was its story, and that the other pronouns
>like togo, inogo, jego followed suit by a second analogy.

I find this solution inventive, but too inelegant to be true.

In my view, it is precisely the fact that c^eso exists which tells us
that jego, kogo, togo etc. *simply cannot* reflect PIE *-esyo or
*-osyo, because that would have given +jeso, +koso, +toso, as proven
by c^eso.

>It should
>perhsps be pointed out that in the adjective forms ending in -ogo, -ego,
>-ago are from the *definite* adjective and so reflect forms like OCS
>nova-jego with old ablative (-a) and genitive (-go) superimposed. This
>further restricts the Slavic g-forms to the grammatical sector of pronouns
>where OPruss. indicates that the old consonant was -s-. I know too little
>about the details of the reduction the velar to Russ. [-v-] to express an
>opinion about it. I find it a little strange that, while unaccented -ajego
>ended up [-&v&], the accented variant is [-ov&] although there was never
>an /o/ in the form. Surely we cannot reanalyze PIE on such a basis,
>especially if we are not sure we are talking about the correct item.

I don't think I'm re-analyzing all that much. The pronominal ablative
ending was surely *-ot (as shown by Skt. mát, tvát), which would have
given *e-ot, *kWe-ot as well as *to-ot, *kWo-ot (besides, to be sure,
*esmo:t, *kWesmo:t, *tosmo:t and *kWosmo:t). That *to-ot and *kWo-ot
yielded contracted *tõ:t and *kWõ:t is as expected, but the same does
not apply necessarily to *eot and *kWeot. I see no reason why the
Latin ablative eo: (despite its analogical long vowel) can't go back
to PIE *eot. If Slavic jego reflects *eot, that would also nicely
explain the hitherto mysterious /v/ in Russian, as the hiatus-breaking
glide before /o/ in Slavic is known to fluctuate between /w/ > /v/ and
/h/ (I'm assuming Proto-Slavic had a phoneme /h/, otherwise reflecting
PIE *-s in the Auslaut).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...