Jens:
>This could yield a principled account for the difference between
>-u- and -ri- of the substantival forms: *-ro- loses its /r/ after roots
>that have a sonant of their own; [...]
Oh, I just can't take this random theorizing anymore. It would
be nice, Jens, if you had a coherent list of rules that you had
devised, like I have, to paint a diachronic picture of all the
relevant Pre-IE stages up to Reconstructed IE, but you don't.
So you invent haphazardly new rules, no matter how absurd.
Now you have this *u=*r rule that really takes the cake.
It's hard to faithfully put aside the fact that *-u and *-ro-
just don't look anything like each other. But when you go on
with it without a modicum of convincing evidence to support
your claims, it's hard not to lose it on you >:(
Like I tell Miguel about blindly connecting *tu/*yus and
assuming for no reason that *yus once had **t- because it
fits his preconceived notion, you also disregard reasonable internal
reconstruction for something random. I'm sorry. Your theory
doesn't fly. Here's how it really goes afaic...
The ending *-u is an adjectival ending that has other related
forms in IE through preIE agglutination of other suffixes to it,
such as *-w-ent- and *-u-r. As a suffix on its own, it acquired
the final accent because it was an adjectival suffix, clearly by
analogy with thematic adjectives which had themselves developped
from a misanalysis of the final-accented, genitival *-os as *-o-s.
I've stated this before and I even already said that it occured in
early Late IE. If anything, I'm consistent. So the ultimate accent
on this suffix can only be traced back to early Late IE because
of that, and the zero-grade of *-u itself doubly reinforces this.
Before this, the accent was on the stem, not the suffix. The
suffix probably existed even in Mid IE as *-eu and there is a
potential external cognate with Etruscan /-u/ (cf. /car-u/ "made").
In regards to the etymology of *-ro- however, there is no
stage in the forseeable past at which we can credibly link it
with *-u unless we want to continue your ad hoc charade.
Rather, what I have to say about *-ro- is merely intuitive
and probably said before. It is a thematized extension of
the nominal ending *-r. Here, the thematization was in
order to convert it into an adjective, meaning simply "that
which is of or like X". The suffix was synthesized in early
Late IE.
As for the *e/*o/*i alternation that you see, I can meet
you part way and say the following. The *e/*o alternation
is, as I already mentioned, the product of a single vowel
in early Late IE, *@ (schwa), becoming long before voiced
segments. The lengthened schwa ultimately became *o.
However, when *@ occured _before_ the accent of a
word, it was raised to *i. Since *@ only developped in
stems AFTER the accent, the only times that *@ could
have become *i was in the first element of compounds
where the accent was on the _second_ element or in
reduplicated presents like *stistax- (< *st@-ste'x-) which
again showed accent on the second iteration of the verb
stem. This also implies that the i-reduplication is an early
Late IE innovation as well.
You confuse other instances of *i with this however,
which only adds to your confusion. For instance, *kWi-
and *kWo- are not related to this schwa phenomenon
any more than the same pattern of *tu and *twe is.
Rather this pattern is a seperate thing occuring
specifically in pronominals and demonstratives. One is
the "strong" form and the other the "weak" form
and speaks of a diphthong-reduction of enclitics that
happened in the distant past (ie: in IndoTyrrhenian).
Finally, the *u/*eu alternation you see in the adjectival
paradigms is just the way it was when the accent was
originally on the STEM. If you place the accent on
the stem where it belongs, the pattern becomes
more regular. When it migrated to final position because
of analogy, it obscured this original pattern still seen in
nouns like *peku- or *genu-, the pattern caused by
Mid IE's penultimate accent.
= gLeN
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