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

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 12:55:59 +0000, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
wrote:

>>
>> 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.

The converse (3rd. person influencing other persons) is known as Watkins'
Law. That doesn't mean that 2nd. person can never have an influence on
3rd. or other persons (especially, I would think, in the imperative and
modal forms like conjunctive/optative). My paradigm above reflects neither
Watkins' law nor anything similar to the Old Norse situation: the ending
*-s is here simply the fortuitous merger of the original 2nd. person ending
**-tu and the original third person ending **-su.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...