Re: [tied] Re: Syncope

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 enlil@... wrote:

> First and foremost:
> > I don't see you learning even when given the best of
> > opportunities by being told flat out.
>
> Hmmm, That sounds a little _itchy, doesn't it?
>
> Anyways, back to calm and collective...
>
> Putting aside *polh-no- then, if you admit that
> *pelh-, *plh- and *pleh- all co-existed in IE itself,
> then what forces me to believe that *pelh- was
> formed by analogy from *plh-. That seems like a lame
> excuse since you can't predict the analogy. I don't
> see why I should accept random rules of yours.
> Certainly a theory is not hard evidence. I say that
> *pelh- did not derive from *plh-. Prove me wrong.

Schwebeablaut quite generally works that way: It hits roots whose
unconditioned form has the structure TReT in unproductive forms, and has
the result that productive categories often show up with TeRT. That is
what Anttila found. In the case of *pleH1-, Piotr has also insisted that
the old form has "full-grade two", using the comparative *pleH1-yos- of
Gk. pleío:n and Skt. prá:yas- as particularly impressive points de repère.

>
> With *stex-, there is no guarantee what it derives
> from by just looking at it. It could be from *stex-,
> *Vstex- or *sVtex-. You say that your O-fix theory
> shows that it derives from *stex- simply because
> *o is found in the "first available slot" of the
> root and yields *stox-eye-. And what evidence shows
> us that O-fix applies in the causative?

The "o-infix" as I choose to call it (I am the discoverer of it, some
would say the inventor, but at least it is my suggestion, so I do not like
it to change its name while it is still under discussion) was first seen
in the causative. The whole theory is about the vocalism of the
causative. The option *Vstex- is new to the debate, being brought in only
now. The fate of my infix does not exclude that. The absence of examples
accenting such a vowel however renders it a funny guess (still, there are
funny languages).

> Why isn't it
> simple o-grade? You keep on saying the "facts"
> demand it but the evidence is ethereal to me.

That's why I took the trouble to spell out the exact arguments in detail
in my posting of February 11 (title "Infixal /o/" which I would like to be
kept). I do not remember if you responded to that, at least I have heard
nothing that would increase my doubts.

>
> > It is like not looking when passing at a green
> > light - you get killed the minute the unexpected
> > happens.
>
> I guess that means that you're too afraid to cross
> on a green for fear of an improbable event.

Yes, with my eyes closed in fact I am.

> Clearly
> your sense of logic is flawed then. Most people,
> aside from Jens, understand that "green" means "go".
> I personally can't be worried about my eventual
> demise for otherwise I wouldn't be able to function.

Okay, but in my case it would be *my* demise, so I do care very much.

> This is why prioritizing thoughts is needed.
>
>
> > It is unwise to dismiss possibilities.
>
> I don't dismiss them. I prioritize them. There are many
> theories I've dismissed only to have them revisited and
> assimilated, including your ideas.

Yes, 100% vs. 0%, and that's the silliness. Besides, I do not accept your
priorities.

> > The working of the ablaut on the input to the form
> > proves that the structure existed at the time the ablaut
> > operated.
>
> Hardly. If "snowboard" is given a suffix "ing", does that
> mean that "snowboarding" dates to the time when "ing" was
> first formed? That's nonsense.

I don't see how a suffix can begin ablauting after ablaut is over and
there were no examples of the suffix that were ever hit by the ablaut.
Where would it get its allomorphs from? Would people begin spicing up
*-men- with a variant *-mn.- just because the roots had full-grade and
zero-grade alternants? That's one of the things I believe we can quietly
forget.

> You assume without proof that *dHugHmhno- is sufficiently
> ancient. I say that it isn't because the middle hadn't
> yet formed until after Syncope. Now, you've mentioned an
> analysis of *-mhno- as *-mn-hn-o- which is interesting and
> even more damaging for you because if this is so, then we
> _require_ SYNCOPE in order to yield your admitted ZERO
> grade of *en "in" and only in this zeroed soup of the
> resultant *-mnhno- may we drop the first *n in order to
> yield our *-mhno- in the first place! Ergo, you proved
> yourself wrong rather brilliantly. Congratulations. I
> think you were too busy insulting my learning capability to
> form a tight arguement.

I see your point. I should not be above admitting that I was pressing a
point too much. If what we were talking about at this point was the
underlying degree of complexity of suffixes, then I actually do maintain
that IE suffixes are simpler than many roots.


I said the middle-voice participle suffix is as complicated as the roots
unless we analyze it the way I report, so what if we are wrong about that
analysis? But since I do find that analysis appealing I should not make it
look like a problem. It still would be if *-men- was older *-ment-,
though; I believe it was, but perhaps the suffix was reduced *before* the
creation of zero-grade in this case.

> So now that we must logically date *-mhno- to the
> postSyncope period, the etymon as a whole has no weight
> here in regards to Mid IE. Don't mention it again.

*-mH1nó-, feels good.

> As for *wertmn, in light of the new Quasipenultimate
> Rule... (I know this new theory switcheroo seems like a
> cruel joke but I assure you I came to this new conclusion
> out of independent necessity)... *wertmn would now be
> reconcilable according to Mid IE syllabics: *wérta-man.
> It yields eLIE preSyncope *wert'm'n and thus *wertmn.
> This is assuming that the ending existed at that time,
> of course.

No quarrel with the last part, but I cannot accept the root-final "-a". It
takes solid motivation to postulate a vowel in a position where it never
surfaces. No roots present final vowels in any forms.

>
> > So, if there were roots ending in clusters (-wgh- in this
> > case),
>
> Sorry I don't recognize that ending. Can you supply a
> REAL one this time? One that is not the product of
> synthesis like we agree *-mhno- is? One relevant to
> this discussion and Mid IE preferably?

I was speaking of the root *dhewgh- of Sanskrit dógdhi, duhánti 'milk'.
There is no morphological seam in *dhewgh-.

> > Ancient enough: the middle-voice forms have been
> > operated upon by the ablaut, so they obviously
> > existed at the time we are talking about.
>
> Again, quantitative ablaut is a process initiated by
> Syncope. The presence of ablaut does not guarantee
> that the given form or paradigm is more ancient than
> Syncope. The middle endings were clearly derived
> from active ones at a relatively early age, yes,

No. The middle endings are not derived from active endings, but the
pre-existing middle endings are partly, and increasingly, adjusted to the
corresponding active endings throughout the history of the older
languages.

> but
> what "early" means is the question. From what I've
> found, the middle can be best explained as follows.
>
> In MIE, it was merely a phrasal pattern, perhaps
> something like the following:
>
> *tWa bér-es ar             "you carry yourself"
> *mas wewálpa-wa da         "we helped each other"
> *kawánam yauas gwén-mes da "we slay for you the dog"
>
> ... would become in postSyncope eLIE ...
>
> *tw& bér&-s&r              "you carried yourself"
> *m&s wewálp-w&d&           "we helped each other"
> *kwanm yus gwén-m&sd&      "we slay for you the dog"
>
> The postparticle *ar would signify "for" (> *r)
> while *de means "in, within, among" (cf. *-dHi).
> The postparticles go with the accusative pronoun
> in the beginning but *ar or *da cannot be inserted
> within the verbal phrase between the pronoun and
> the verb, so it is postposed. The exact meanings
> are more like "you carried (*beres), for yourself
> (tWa...ar)", "we helped (*wewalpawa), amongst
> ourselves (mas...da)" and "we slay (gwenmes) the
> dog (kawanam) amongst yourselves (yauas...da)."
>
> The same "mediopassive" particles are placed after
> a noun to give them a special locative or dative
> nuance.

No comment. No comment at all.

>
> > I see no sign of deficiency in the middle-voice
> > inflection,
>
> The use of *-dHwe in the 2pp suggests strongly its
> origin from perfect endings where the 2pp was absent.

No, it's short, not absent.

> The *we here is the eroded 2pp oblique *us and *dH
> is the postparticle above, leaving a null 2pp.
> Everything shows that the middle is simply a
> derivative of other pre-existing _active_ paradigms.


> > No, that is silly. Roots have no accentual oppositions,
> > they can only go into the zero-grade if they are combined
> > [yadayadayada]
>
> You misunderstood. Of course I meant "roots that are
> inflected" as opposed to "stems" and other derivatives.

Well, what the inflections sit on in IE morphology is in fact a stem. Do
you honestly believe there were no derived stems by the time of the
ablaut? How did the optative suffix come to ablaut? The stative suffix?
The suffix *-m(e)n-? *-w(e)nt-? *-(e)s-? *-t(e)r/l-? The present-forming
nasal infix *-n(e)-? The feminine marker *-y(e)H2-? The verb-noun-forming
suffixes *-t(e)w- and *-t(e)y-?

> We don't know how old a stem might be but chances
> are it's not very old. With an indivisible much-used root
> like *es-, chances are it's ancient. We can split more
> hairs but that's all I was getting at. So your use of
> *dHugHmhno- and *wertmn are derailing the discussion
> because my simple inability to derive their Mid IE
> equivalents doesn't disqualify my theory. In that sense,
> you're being unfair.

It self-avowedly disqualifies your reconstructions as parts of a
real language. The IE word consists of root + suffix + desinence,
sometimes with multiple suffixes, and the ablaut worked on the lot. There
is no way suffixation can be a post-ablaut innovation. Ablauting suffixes
must have existed by the time the ablaut worked, how else could they show
a strong and a weak alternant?

> >> Looking at it another way, a grammatical analysis of MIE
> >> would bring us to the conclusion that the 3ps of a verb,
> >> whether it be ending in a vowel (*kWera "she creates",
> >> *palewa "it rains") or not (*wes "he remains", *ei "she
> >> goes") lacked any suffix for person.
> >
> > No, they all have one.
>
> Many accept *-t as deriving from an affixed demonstrative
> stem *to- because it is a trivial solution. You're resisting
> it because you didn't think of it first and because, as
> I can tell, you enjoy being stubborn like me.

This is not serious talk. Of course I did not think of it first, Bopp did.
But whatever the origin of the *-t, I would assume it was present in the
3sg active in the IE on which the ablaut worked.

> Since you
> want to pursue the random *s/*t sound change idea, you'll
> never understand that *to- was once a general distal
> demonstrative unmarked for gender, and hence its usage for
> all 3ps subjects as well as its continuing usage in oblique
> animate forms instead of *so.

Indeed *to- is a deictic pronoun, and its function ties in quite
nicely with the ending *-t. That is very old news. It does not give us any
license to either derive *-t from *-to, or *to- from simple *t-, for we
have no rules to allow that. It still could well be the same /t/: I see
nothing that would exclude the existence of related morphemes in the
stage we can reach by rolling back the ablaut. Surely there will also be
problems that are not even solved by that operation.

> > If that were anywhere near true, thematic stems should
> > not coexist with athematic stems of the same morphemes.
>
> I retract my statement. There is no "proof" really of
> final vowels on verb roots except the syllabic rules that
> are necessitated by IE itself thanks to the proper
> observation of unintuitive patterns like accent
> alternation for example. Thematic verbs are the normal
> result of the durative conjugation, while athematic
> verbs are either corrupt thematic stems or borrowed
> from the aorist.

Is the verb 'to be' an old aorist now? Are the athematic verbs that exist
only in the present aspect old aorists? If not, what corruption is
supposed to be at work here, where others have no problems accepting the
language as it is?

> At any rate, please don't confuse
> the thematic ending of subjunctives with the ACTUAL
> thematic vowel seen in their default durative paradigm.
> The subjunctive vowel is from something else.

It is all we need. Once we get the subjunctive from somewhere we do not
need the simple thematic type at all. There are *no* IE structures that
had to grow a thematic vowel to be phonotactically acceptable, if that is
what you mean. Even the most complicated of structures exist without
thematic accretions.

>
> > The 3sg active of the root aorist has full grade. This
> > is outrageous.
>
> You mean there are no zero-grade aorists? You mean
> that it's not *likWt... it's *leikWt? I don't get
> what you're trying to say here.

I am of course saying just that. I think it's a fair statement that there
are no root aorists with original zero-grade in the strong parts of the
paradigm (active singular). I know only *bhuH-t as a serious candidate of
a root aorist that generalized its zero-grade alternant already in PIE.
And I am not even sure that is true.

>
> > Syllable structure does not create IE /o/ of any kind.
>
> I agree. It wouldn't be natural to have *o as an epenthetic
> vowel. It's *a, that LATER becomes *o because of Vowel Shift.

No, syllabic structure did not create any *prestage* of IE /o/ of any
kind either.

> Unlike you, I now have a reason for the vowel insertion and
> syllable structure explains it. You simply reject it out
> of turn but you still don't state why. Why can't syllable
> structure as I've stated it explain this?

Because the structure containing -o- is opposed to zero. The two are
opposed to each other and so cannot be equated.

> > I see what's coming; forget it, it just is not phonetically
> > conditioned.
>
> I never said it was. It's syllabically conditioned.

I meant the word phonetically to include that.

> Phonetics
> play no part in the process but *a, as I said, is more natural
> as an insert-vowel than *o anyday.

It cannot be an insert-vowel. The structures without the -o- do not insert
vowels, so the structures with the -o- must have a different background.
And I have told you how.

> All you can say in opposition
> is that "the infixal o-form is opposed to zero-grade of the
> same element (minus the infix, that is)" but your word by
> itself is nothing to go on. Here you're just insisting on
> your analysis the way you see it. In your mind, you can't
> see anything but *CeC > *OCeC > *COeC > *CoC when in
> actuality, *C'C > (*aC'C >) *CaC > *CoC makes far more intuitive
> sense.

No, that becomes CC. Why would *men-éye-ti *insert* a vowel in the
reduction product *mnéyeti to give the output *monéyeti, if the participle
*men-tó-s did not insert anything in *mntós which lives on as *[mn.tós]?

> Yes, the O-fix/a-Epenthesis was to avoid a **zeroed**
> syllable. Otherwise what you say is senseless, even with all
> the proof behind it.

If I said that it would in fact be senseless. The o-infix is not
epenthetic, for it is opposed to zero.

> The process and the result between my version and yours are
> in effect the same (which you don't seem to realize) except
> that the latter concept now gives the theory _motivation_
> by something.

You are very right I don't realize that.

> In this case, the motivation behind the process
> is simply Syncope and phonotactics. We know already that
> Syncope exists so it's not as if we're inventing anything
> from thin air. Instead we're reinforcing the theory.

No, you are clinging on to it not permitting yourself to realize that it
has failed.

> > The complexity of a putative "*bHe:rst" is at the end,
> > but the idiotic "a-Epenthesis" is supposed to alleviate
> > complexity in initial position.
>
> Idiotic now? :) I love it when I strike a nerve. It's the
> pain one feels when something someone else says may be
> on the right track. Now, you fail to understand a lot
> here though. Let's reiterate:
>
>   1) a-Epenthesis only affects the _initial_ segment
>      of a word, not its ending. You yourself always
>      speak of a prefixed or infixed *O, not suffixed.

Yes.

>
>   2) The 3ps *-t derives ultimately from a demonstrative,
>      and thus 3ps was once without ending.

The *-t may be identical with the /t/ of the demonstrative stem *to-, yes.
But when that is used as an ending, the word is not "without ending".

> Even so, *bHe:rst < eLIE *ber's-t' showing an underlying
> CV(C) pattern anyway.
>
>
> > Forgot your message? You insist that all initial clusters
> > have lost vowels between the consonants.
>
> Nope, apparently YOU forgot my message. I'm saying that it
> is most optimal to derive all initial clusters to forms
> obeying a CVC-pattern which doesn't necessarily mean that
> a vowel is originally found between the initial cluster
> (eg: CCVC < VCCVC).

Okay, that's a new formulation, but fine. But why would it be a
CVC-pattern? And why would the language refrain from using initial
clusters if it has some elsewhere? I know some languages do that, but why
assume it if there is no evidence for it?

The infixal o shows there were no vowels in the slots between consonants
preceding the full-grade vowel. You appear to accept this, for you have
not reacted to the points where I brought it in. The existence of a mobile
accent that never includes a putative initial vowel is odd, but I cannot
exclude it with certainty.

Jens