Rob:
>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.
This is logically inferior to the more natural conclusion that both share an
inherited marker *-m for the _accusative_. You are trying too desperately to
fit the evidence to your theory rather than fitting your theory to the
evidence. Please just _accept_ the fact that both language groups share
the same accusative, not ergative, marker. The onus is on you to show that
the original form was ergative, but since both plainly use *-m as an
accusative,
this task is next to impossible.
>I understand what you mean. However, no other language group, to my
>knowledge, has a sigmatic nominative.
Etruscan :) Erh, well not a nominative per se but /-s'/ is tacked on to
many
"human" words. It's more like an honorific like Japanese /o-/. I suspect
that
there are traces of the origins of the sigmatic nominative in Tyrrhenian
languages because IndoTyrrhenian *se would have been used as a definite
article for animate (particularly human) nouns. One branch used it as an
honorific, the other used it as an animate nominative. However, to accept
this, we have to first accept the obvious: The nominative derives from a
postfixed demonstrative.
As for inanimate *-d coming from the ablative, which I already warned was
absurd to me, I see some problems with your theory that you still don't
address. One is that you fail to explain the strange, resultant dimorphia of
nominative *-s versus genitive *-os. Another is that you ignore the fact
that the inanimate is completely _unmarked_ for the nominative. This *-d
only occurs in _pronominals_. So your theory just can't be correct.
Believe me, it's simpler to accept that *-s comes from earlier postfixed *s&
(> *so).
- gLeN
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