[tied] Re: Eggs from birds and swift horses

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "elmeras2000" <jer@...> wrote:

> --- 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.
>

I can't help but notice that your o-prefix infecting a root to become
an o-infix looks a lot like the /a/ of Schrijver's "language of bird
names" which does something similar.

Torsten