Re: Accusative was allative

> > 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.

I'm not so sure of that.
"news" to an English speaker is a plural
"nieuws" to a Dutch speaker is a genitive
"nys" to a Danish speaker is non-analysable separate entry
but they are all old (partitive) genitives. And a partitive genitive
is a nice place to start for building a plural. And why is there all
this *-s/*-i confusion in both gen.sg. and nom.pl.?

> > 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.

That's why I suspect the accusative of having moved the stress to the
stem, from having it on the ending when it was only an allative. Thus
arose the e/o ablaut (zero grade was already there).


Torsten