[tied] Re: Caland [was -m (-n)?]

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> OK. I'll try one more time.
>
> Suppose there was a phonetic split that caused an adjectival suffix,
> whatever its original shape, to split into two.
>
> After the split, we have two _separate_ suffixes: *-u and *-ro.

The question is: what caused that split? It must have been something
phonological. Now if those adjectives are part of a language in which
adjectives are part of a paradigm, eg case, or number (or whatever)
such as is the case in PIE, that split would have been caused by the
various case/number suffixes. This would lead to a heterogenous
pardigm for those adjectives.

>
> _We_ know they are historically related, because we have the

comparative

> data, and we know Sanskrit and Latin and stuff, but if you're a

peasant

> tilling the land on the banks of the Nemunas or the Tarim, I don't

think

> that by the sound of it you'd know they were related.
>
> So how did the pre-Tocharians know, when they decided that

adjectives

> should be thematic, that they were supposed to replace those

cumbersome

> u-stems with ro-adjectives, instead of, say, -wo, or -no, -mo, -

to, -ko, or

> plain -o? And how did the Lithuanians, when they decided that it

was

> boring to have so many thematic adjectives, know that they were

supposed to

> replace ro-adjectives with u-stem adjectives, and not i-stems, or r-

stems,

> or whatever?
>
> That sounds as crazy as suggesting that pre-proto-Germanic took

part in de

> satem shift, but after a while the proto-Germans decided to reverse

that.

>
> Basically, there seem to me to be four possibilities.
>
> 1) Crazy as sounds, this is what happened. After all, speakers of

Egyptian

> Arabic indeed did revert the ji:m-phoneme to its pre-Classical (and
> proto-Semitic) pronunciation /g/. The fact that there was _no

merger_

> involved makes it at least possible, even if unlikely.
>

Danish "restored" /k/ and /g/ from the /tj/ and /dj/ of Danish
dialects and (older) Swedish and Norwegian.

> 2) The whole thing (sonant/vocoid soundlaw) is an artefact of the

surviving

> data. That's the "alternative scenario" I suggested.
>
> 3) At the time of the breakup of PIE, *-u and *-ro shared something
> _semantical_, which was not shared by any other adjectival suffixes.
> Whatever it was, I cannot recognize it in the semantics of the

attested u-

> and ro-adjectives. They are just adjectives, and they don't seem

to share

> a common semantic overtone, different from that of i-stem or that

of other

> thematic adjectives.
>
> 4) At the time of the breakup of PIE, *-u and *-ro shared something
> _phonological_, which was not shared by any other adjectival

suffixes.

> Whatever it was, it has since been lost, given the fact that /u/

and /ro/

> do not share much phonetically. However, I'd like to stress here

again

> that Armenian u-stem adjectives have a nom/acc. sg. in -r. Since

Armenian

> derives from PIE, it's not totally unreasonable to derive that -r

from *-ur

> in PIE, if only for the NA sg. _neuter_ of u-stem adjectives.
>

And apparently Armenian is an example of a language in which such a
paradigm (using the "ancestor" of -u- and -ro-) has become
heterogenous. Now all one has to do to account for the use of the -ro-
suffix in some languages and the use of -u- in others, is to assume
that the former languages generalised by analogy the -ro- suffix
(from eg. nom./acc.) and the latter languages the -u- suffix (from
the other cases).

I've used this idea before (see

http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html

).


Torsten