--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <petegray@...> wrote:
> > I think that Sprachbund [Gk, I-I, Armenian] is a mirage. What
else has it
> going for it
> > except the augment?
>
> -osyo genitive
Faliscan Kaisiosio, Old dialectal Latin popliosio.
Germanic *-asa < *-oso may also reflect *-osyo. Wherever we find -sy-
in endings in Sanskrit, Germanic reflects simple -s-, which could
be by sound change.
And if *-osyo is an innovation, how has it come about? Should
innovations not be made plausible by a scenario in which it was easy
for the language to create the new form? Then what was it made from
in this case?
> -su locative plural
Also Baltic and Slavic; OIr. ís, Welsh is 'below' from *pe:d-su. And
isn't Anatolian *tri-su 'three times' not simply "in three" (i.e. in
triplicate)? Iranian *thris^uwa- 'a third' (fraction) would support
the antiquity of the Anatolian multiplicative, denoting the unit of
a three-way split.
> ma: negative
Albanian mos < *me:-kWe; Tocharian AB ma: 'not'
> perfect restructured (or retained) as an independent tense
Not so in Armenian. Germanic is much closer to the Gk./IIr. picture.
All of the above is retention and therefore not valid as a basis for
language grouping.
> plus vocabulary.
I don't think that gives the picture you say. I even think it is
very hard to get the impression that the Indo-Iranian vocabulary is
in any way especially close to that of Greek. Greek is more often
used in easy comparisons with Sanskrit, but that is because there
are comparatively few changes in Greek so that the connection is
easier to see and to demonstrate. I have not made any counts, but I
would say the lexemes recur with about the same density in the other
branches.
Jens