Torsten:
> I discussed it off-list with Jens. He tells me that
> accusative *-m is from a genitive *-m that later became
> the gen.pl. (I think it was)
Since *-om is a genitive _plural_ while *-m is intrinsically
singular, that idea is not a serious possibility. While it may
seem wonderfully symmetrical on the very immediate surface to
connect the nominative singular *-s and the accusative singular
*-m with the genitive singular *-os and the genitive plural
*-om, you may note that the two connections are without a
discernible pattern. Their presumed shifts in usage if this
theory were correct are erratic and illogical. Rather, this
connection is weak, being based solely on phonetics. There
is a danger in relating anything together simply because
of similitude. Otherwise we could relate the English genitive
-'s with the plural -s... of course, we'd be very very wrong.
Instead, I recognize *-m to be etymologically seperate from
genitive plural *-om and also then from the verbal nouns which
use this latter ending for genitival derivatives. The genitive
plural, being quite different from the singular in *-os, must
surely have been introduced during a late stage just before
Reconstructed IE, where up to this point nouns were not
declined for plurality in anything other than the
nominative and accusative cases. This is not terribly strange
because these "strong" cases reflect the main foci of a
sentence, subject and object, while any other cases like
the genitive are mainly used to mark lesser, indirect objects
whose plurality is not as important to the overall message
of the sentence.
Presumably, *-om would have originally had a locative function
(remembering that it would have been unmarked for plurality)
such as "amid, within, among", which would explain its usage
in the plural genitive since "of the women" is tantamount to
saying "from amongst or within the group of women". Such a
shift from locative to genitive is a trivial one and therefore
a more optimal solution here.
= gLeN