Miguel:
>And what assumption do you use to explain the miraculously disappearing
>*y? If *yu- is the zero-grade of *yeu-, then what is *u-?
"Entropy" comes to mind. Your idea of *us becoming *yus is like a table
that builds itself from scratch. It's less strange for *y- to disappear,
even
if it's for just one word, than it is for *y- to show up from nowhere.
There is just no motivation whatsoever for *y- to be inserted. This is
not about what _could_ happen so much as what is more likely to happen.
Disintegration, not unmotivated prothesis, is more likely.
>There are several objections to be made against such a hypothesis.
FINALLY! I was dying for you to respond to this with some criticism
but you wouldn't bite! :)
>The use of a verbal or nominal root is unheard in the personal pronouns.
That's not a reasonable expectation. Not all pronouns may be replaced by
"verbal/nominal roots" in any particular language. However, this same
process _does_ occur in other languages. The immediate example in my
mind is Japanese 1ps informal /boku/, a noun meaning "servant". Also 3ps
/kanojo/ meaning "that woman". So claiming IE *yus as deriving from a
noun meaning "group" based on the attested verb *yeu- follows the
exact same linguistic lines.
>If the root were *yeu-, a root noun derived from it should be *yut-
While I'm listening to what you're saying, I don't agree with you. You're
thinking IE as it came to be, not as it was. From what I can gather now,
the 2pp stem in Mid IE was *ya:u "a/the group", an endingless stative noun
derived from *yeu- which was meant to refer indirectly to the 2pp. In
fact, it's a very natural usage and is even used in English. Eg: "What has
the group decided?" for "What have _yo'll_ decided?" The use of endingless
verbs exists elsewhere in IE, for example *nu "now" < "being new" <
*neu- "to be new" from which we obtain the adjective *new-o-s.
>Actually, the root is in my opinion *yeuh1-,
It's an "opinion", not fact per se. Since it's safe to say that *yeu-g-
should be grouped with the above root, its existence negates your
theory. Rather, we must analyse *(s)yeuh- as *(s)yeu-h-. Both
*(s)yeu-h- and *yeu-g- are extensions of *yeu-.
>Since the nominal plural is *-es, never *-s, that would have given a
>paradigm:
If the original meaning was a singular stative noun *ya:u "_a_ group",
it calls into question whether we have an original plural marker, or
a nominative mistaken as a plural based on *weis. You see, back to
MIE, a proper animate nominative should consist of the postclitic *se.
This gives us MIE *ya:u-se > eLIE *ya:us(@) > *yo:us > IE *yu:s.
Certainly by as early as the beginning of Late IE, the phonetics of
*ya:us, not to mention the semantics, could easily cause one to
think of it henceforth as a plural.
Of course, it would be logically simpler to presume that it was a
plural right from the beginning.
= gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/bcomm&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.msn.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket%3den-ca