--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
> The plural doesn't fit either. *-oisu+en should have given
something like
> *-aise, not -uose (*-o:s-en). It's as if *en had been added to the
acc.pl.
> (also works in the a:- and i-stems: *-a:(n)s-en > -ose, *-i:(n)s-en
>
> -yse). But the accusative doesn't work in the singular.
>
I've just checked Zinkevic^ius' _A historical grammar of Lithuanian_.
For the o-stems he offers *-ei > (East Baltic monophthongization
under certain prosody-related conditions) *-e.: (long narrow [e:.])
*én > (contraction) *-én > -è. For the plural, his analysis is the
same as yours (he quotes a lot of historical/dialectal material which
leaves little room for the alternative analyses, plus the locative
plural's accusative is paralleled by the illative plural, undoubtedly
underlied by the accusative).
Interestingly enough, he quotes historical/dialectal material
demonstrating the old ("true") form of the locative plural for every
stem (
a:-stems _s^akosù_ 'branch-Lpl'
o-stems _keturíesu_ '4-Lpl' (íe < *é.: < (East Baltic development,
cf. _víenas_ 'one')*-oi-), cf. Standard Lithuanian (analogical)
_keturíese_ 'four (of us)'
i-stems _akisù_ 'eye-Lpl'
u-stems _dangusu_ 'heaven-Lpl' (found thrice in Maz^vydas's texts,
though it's remains unclear whether the first _u_ indeed renders a
short vowel here, and if it doesn't, it can't be an archaism, but is
rather to be interpreted as a Low Lithuanian innovation)
C-stems _s^un(i)sù_ 'dog-Lpl'
), so probably the whole innovational (postpositional) locative
question is of little relevance for the reconstruction of proto-Balto
(-Slavic) locatives.
Sergei