Rob:
>What are your thoughts regarding the origins of the various PIE
>participles?
Like the endings *-no- and *-to-? I got ideas.
I regard these two endings as ancient, stemming from at least
IndoTyrrhenian. They occur in Etruscan as well where /-na/ is
an adjectival ending. We also find /-tHa/. This causes me to
reconstruct IndoTyrrhenian *-na and *-ta although I'm not
sure on their exact functions.
Heavy penultimate stress in Mid IE caused the reduction of
the vowel to *-n& and *-t&. By Late IE, the inherited suffixes
would have normally lost their unstressed vowels, however
suffixes of the form CV did not lose their vowel in order to
retain their syllable. Thus they were preserved into Late IE
unchanged. When the recently "clipped" nominative in *-s
(related to *so) was also added to the endingless nominative,
it automatically lengthened the preceding vowel, causing
*-n&:-s and *-t&:-s. Due to a vowel shift, *&: became *o,
producing the familiar *-no-s and *-to-s.
The End.
= gLeN
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