From: elmeras2000
Message: 31114
Date: 2004-02-16
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:
[On the augment:]
> Latin has
> traces like /e:st/ of course, but it evidently
> wasn't such a vital prefix in IE. This suggests
> that it was a post-IE innovation.
You mean some other languages having some other traces of course,
that's fine. But the last sentence is a plain non sequitur. If there
are traces of the augment in languages other than those you grant
membership of the augment club, that club must have been bigger at
one time. If it comprises Celtic, Italic and Balto-Slavic, what more
is needed to make it Indo-European?
Anyway, that was not the point. It was of course the point *you*
were making, but you were making it wrongly. If a collocation of
adverb + verb can grow into a one-word-form in the case of the
augmented verbal forms, be it in PIE or later in a separate
subsection, surely an exactly comparable process can be accepted to
fuse a preceding "/O/" and the thematic noun it connects with, into
the o-prefix, later o-infix formations we were discussing. You may
have other reasons to dismiss it, but the particular objection you
chose to make this time is not valid.
Jens