--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:
> Peter:
> > And the augment?
>
> Dialectal, not completely IE. It's immediately derived
> from an affixed demonstrative.
Pardon me for barging in, it sounded like my cue: Even if the
augment *is* a dialectal matter (which I do not think is true), what
difference does that make? We are talking principles here, and if
languages like Sanskrit, Greek and Armenian, which are also lavishly
suffixal and generally hostile to prefixes, could fuse a simple
collocation of two words into a prefixed inflectional form, why
couldn't the same have happened in a single instance in the IE
protolanguage? Why are so many things banned from the protolanguage
which we are forced to accept for languages that we are unfortunate
enough to know?
Jens