[tied] Re: Accusative was allative

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:

> 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.
>
>

I understand that your objection is that genitive *-s is
intrinsically singular and -m is intrinsically plural and therefore
they can't have been derived from something non-distinguished for
number, whereupon you launch a more optimal theory, based on the fact
the pre-PIE did not distinguish for number?

Torsten