Re: [tied] Animate Dual in -h3 (was: IE Roots)

On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:

>
> >[Glen Gordon:] I personally
> >explain the *u as the by-product of final *-o: -- That's it.
>
> No, that can't be it, because:
>
> 1) the -u also appears in non-final position (e.g. dual G *-ous etc.).

That looks like a mistake. The only language distinguishging between
gen.du. and loc.du. appears to be Avestan, where the two are /-{ao}/ and
/-o:/ respectively. The gen. must be Proto-Iranian *-a:h, IIr. *-a:s,
while the loc. could be either *-ah or *-au. The obvious solution is
gen. *-oHs vs. loc. *-oHu. This gives a nice gen. with a well-known
marker, and a loc. du. quite on a par with loc.pl. *-s-u, supposing the
laryngeal to be the marker of the (animate?) dual.

> 2) the o-stem instrumental sg. also ends in *-o: (*-o(:)h1), and there's
> no
> off-glide -u there.

That is not relevant precisely if the instr.sg. ended in a laryngeal and
the nom.-acc.du. did not.

>
> I think we're rather forced to assume that the Kartvelians had no idea
> the
> IE word was a dual.  They borrowed the Semitic word *?arba¿- "4" as "8",
> and the PIE word *ok^toxW "8" as "4".

I'd rather say this looks like a linguistic community with a high degree
of awareness of the power of the dual. It looks to me as if pre-Kartvelian
used the singular of the IE dual word for 'eight' in the reasonable
meaning 'four', and the dual of the Semitic word for 'four' in the meaning
'eight', again quite a reasonable thing.

Jens