>
> 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. The original aorist paradigm would have been:
>
> *déik^-m *dik^-més
> *dé(:)ik^-s *dik^-té
> *dé(:)ik^-s *dik^-é(:)r-s
>
Now this reminds one of the state of Old Norse and Northern Old
English, which is usually described as something like 'the 3rd sg
took on the endings of the 2nd sg' which might adquately describe the
situation, but doesn't make much lingustic sense to me. But suppose
we had some half-baked IE substrate language in those areas, perhaps
the result of emigrated Nordwestblock speakers, perhaps something
more autochthonous, in which the aorist paradigm had spread to the
present tense; this language would then 'bleed through' from below
after a few centuries, and the 'original confusion' of 2nd and 3rd
sg. would appear in those Germanic successor languages (it is very
difficult to reintroduce distinctions that have been lost into a
language). Another piece of evidence: the two-gender status of
Scandinavian and Dutch; a situation similar to the one in Hittite;
perhaps Nordwestblck was a common/neuter gender language?
Torsten