Piotr:
>To support this connection, you should demonstrate that there are some
>Semitic loans among the roots showing the *s mobile (preferably a
>significant percentage of them).
Agreed.
>I gather you assume that the original causative value of the initial *s-
>was
>not recognised by the Indo-Europeans,
Not to any large degree, which is not to say that the causitive nuance
doesn't surface in the resultant meaning of the IE loan from time to time,
so this doesn't immunize my suggestion. We already have good grounds
to support Semitic influence in pre-IE. There are the following to munch
on showing the foreign causitive suffix having been fossilized:
IE Semitic
--------------------------------------------------------------
*per- "go forth" *?br "go forth"
*sper- "strew" *s-?br "spread forth"
*ter- "go through" *?tr "go through"
*ster- "spread" *s-?tr "spread through"
*mer- "think" *?mr "see, know"
*smer- "think" *s-?mr "make see"
When evaluating the plausibility of this idea, we should also grapple
with all other evidence of fossilized Semitic affixes in IndoEuropean
already accrued such as the masculine *-t- in *septm "seven"
(Sem *sab`-it-u-), the *w- in *woid- "know" (Sem *yd` "know"
>Akkadian /idu:/) and apparent pairs like *es- "be"/wes- "remain"
(Sem *ys^y "have" > Akkadian /is^u:/) and finally the *m-prefix
seen in *mad- "be merry, drunk" (note Akkadian /haddu/ "to
rejoice"). That, alongside further suspected loans without
affixing such as *leikW- "leave" (*?lk "go" > Akkadian /ala:ku/)
show that there's more than just chance similarity going on here.
Perhaps it should be stated, since it relates to what I'm saying
above, that the derivation of *?s-u and *wes-u from *es- "be"
and *wes- "remain" occured at an earlier stage, Mid IE, before
a semantic shift took place of the Semitic loans.
The meaning of "good" from "be" and "remain" is barely sensical,
as you verbalize. This is because both verbs had an original
meaning of "have" in the donor language. Thus *?s-u and
*wes-u originally meant "having possessions, wealthy,
prosperous" and hence "good". Now things make sense.
The shift from "have" to "be" is a simple one to understand if
we accept that originally IE required no verb "to be" in phrases
conveying equation. First, *es- came to be used optionally as
meaning "one has", "there is" or "so it is that". Through time
however it acquired the meaning of "be". The use of /avoir/
in French /j'ai faim/ for "I _am_ hungry" can be seen as a parallel
phenomenon showing the universal semantic relationship of the
two verbs.
>If there's anything noteworthy about these words, it's the possibly
>expressive value of *s- in some of them (/sl-/, /sn-/, /st-/ and arguably
>/sp-/ function as "phonaesthemes" even in Modern English).
Yet in the Modern English phonaesthemes are not optional pseudo-
morphemes like *s- appears to be in IE. Perhaps a similar case would
be the "optional" use of /-ate/ as in pairs like amble/ambulate.
= gLeN
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