Re: [tied] Re: Eggs from birds and swift horses (was: the palatal s

>>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

>
>>I do not
>>think the verbal desinences contained the w-element of the personal
>> pronouns. If you write it into the original forms, you have to
>>construe a whole arsenal of additional rules to get it out.
>
> I think the verbal desinences *did* contain the w-element of the
> personal pronouns.  Thats why the 2sg. ending is *-s (< **-tw) and not
> *-t, as we would otherwise have had.

I know you do, that's part of the arsenal I was referring to. I respect it
in so far as yours is not an analysis without basis in profound thoughts.
Still, there are other s/t cases and I don't think their combined evidence
adds up to /tw/.

The relation between *-s and *-t is not so easy; many cases of *-s are
rather plainly from older *-t, or from a common source of *-s/*-t-. There
are not many cases of IE *-t, and if the 3sg active *-t is connected with
the agent-noun suffix of Ved. is.u.bhr.'-t- 'arrow-carrier', then it has
an allomorph with *-n- and even *-nt-, which opens a whole new ballgame.
These are facts that ought to be considered, and they do not lead to /tw/
as the origin of the second person marker in any obvious way.

>>> At the risk of repeating myself, I prefer to explain the *-s as a
>>third
>>> person ending, derived either from [the nominative **su of] *s(w)e
>>(which
>>> was a 3rd. person pronoun before it became a reflexive) or the
>>> demonstrative *so. 
>>
>>If the point is that it makes sense as a reflexive, it specifically
>> does *not* have nominative function.
>
> The point was that pre-PIE had matching 1, 2 and 3rd personal pronouns
> **mu, **tu and **su (cf. Proto-Uralic *mV, *tV, *sV).  The third
> person pronoun later changed into a reflexive pronoun (cf. Old Tamil
> ta:n_ 3rd. person pronoun -> Mod Tamil ta:n_ reflexive pronoun), and
> lost its nominative.  The reflexive accusative remains parallel to the
> 1/2 pronouns (*me < *mwe [or *mme], *twe, *swe).

Later than what? The sibilant is reflexive in Eskimo-Aleut, so that must
be its original function. It is as if you are trying to show me that a
rfl.pron. cannot become a 3rd person pronoun, but it can. The possessive
of the reflexive has turned into possessive of 3sg masc. in German sein,
and into possessive of 3rd person sg. in general in French son. For the
non-possessive Spanish se is well on its way to replace le under special
consitions. So if the s-pronoun of Uralic is connected with the IE
reflexive, the original function was reflexive, since that function
reappears in the next branch, Esk.-Al.

>>Tocharian has many verbal stems that can only have arisen in the
>> sigmatic aorist. And Hittite at least has some.
>
> According to Adams, the s-aorist survives in Tocharian only in the
> Class III preterites.  Those are precisely the ones I meant, which
> have -s(a) as
> a third person singular desinence.  I reject the notion that they are
> survivals of the s-aorist: they represent the seed from which the
> s-aorist
> grew.  In fact, Tocharian itself created an s-middle by extending the
> /s/ (augmented with -a:-) throughout the paradigm in the middles of
> the Class III verbs.

> I don't think the thematic -se/so- presents are relevant in this
> context. They are thematic, they're presents, and they're hard to tell
> apart (at least in Toch A) from *sk^e-presents.

They fall into place within the system we find in the other languages if
the se/so-presents are aorist subjunctives. They have the exact shape of
such forms, and a change from aorist subjunctive to present indicative
is very common indeed, perhaps it is even the most common source of the
e/o-presents. The forms of Tocharian B helps one overcome the difficulties
of A.

You do not know that "Tocharian itself created an s-middle"; the type
corresponds to the middle voice of the s-aorist elsewhere, so what is the
grand demonstration of a Tocharian innovation based on?

>>The sigmatic aorist
>>is not an outgrowth of the root aorist, but the regular aorist of
>> verbs
>> forming an sk-present.
>
> In Hittite at least (and, according to Adams, also in a pre-stage of
> Tocharian, see "Tocharian", p. 76), *every* verb could potentially
> form a sk-present.

That looks more like an innovation, given the clearly lexicalized status of
the present formations in the other languages, frequently matching those of
Tocharian. In that system, lexicalized sk-presents are combined with
lexicalized s-aorists often enough to represent a rule. In Tocharian
itself, s- and sk-presents quite generally form prt.III, which may here be
taken to reflect the s-aorist (though it also continues the perfect).

>>That makes the -s- of the aorist a
>>suffix, not a desinence, from the beginning.
>
> Suffixes can become desinences and desinences can become suffixes. 

But how would you get a desinential *-s into the position it occupies in
the sk-presents? Why would the putative desince have spread to all forms
of the derived durative companion before it was accepted as part of the
stem in the aorist itself? That is so peculiar that it demands a strict
separation of the s-aorist from the sk-presents. And that just seems
impossible, given such pairs as

*pré:k^-s- : *pr.k^-sk^é-ti
*H2é:y-s- : *H2is-sk^é-ti
*g^né:H3-s- : *g^n.H3-sk^é-ti
*yé:m-s- : *ym.-sk^é-ti
*g^é:r&2-s- : Gk. ge:rásko:
stative *-eH1-s- vs. *-eH1-sk^e/o-

That makes it understandable, in fact quite natural, that some verbs show
functional identity between *-sk^e/o- and *-se/o-, the Tocharian class IX
with -sk- in B, but plain -s- in A. One is the old present, the other the
old aorist subjunctive; so it's like the functional equivalence of Vedic
kr.n.óti and kárati, no big deal. I just don't understand that such a
smooth analysis which completely reconciles Tocharian with the rest of
Indo-European has not been the preferred option of anybody who has
expressed an opinion on the matter that I have seen.

> If your
> objection is that there is no logical connection between the
> present-tense
> suffix *-sk(e/o)- and my proposed 3rd.person desinence-turned-suffix
> *-s, then I can say more or less the same about *-sk(e/o)- and your
> proposed reflexive-pronoun-turned-suffix *-swe.  What's the
> connection?

None, I never said there was any. I suggested a connection between the
root-extension /s/ and the reflexive pronoun. I see no indication that
the sigmatic aorist was ever based on the reflexive, or on a demonstrative
predecessor thereof.

Jens