Re: [tied] Strong and weak egos

10-07-03 10:13, Sergejus Tarasovas wrote:

> But wasn't the use of the word mostly emphatic in PIE (and Proto-Baltic,
> in distinction from the situation in Middle English), since it was (and
> still is in, eg., Lithuanian) superfluous as to the grammatical
> information it carried? An emphatic thing is not what you use frequently
> and tend to reduce, is it?

You could say the same of early Germanic, and yet the supposedly strong
form *eka had the weak counterpart *ik there, and it's the _strong_ form
that was lost in West Germanic. The contrast *h1eg^ : *h1eg^om may well
date back to PIE. Grammatically superfluous words need not be emphatic
in the prosodic sense; they need not be rare either. If the 'ego'
pronoun had not been used _very_ frequently, it would not have survived
so successfully despite being "the odd man out" in a suppletive paradigm.

Piotr