On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 22:13:20 +0300, Âàäèì Ïîíàðÿäîâ
<
ponaryad@...> wrote:
>The pronominal stem *wo is well-attested in Slavic: Serbian e-vo "this" (cf. e-no "that"), Macedonian -va (an enclitic article) etc.
Indo-Iranian ava-, Slavic ovU, are generally derived from
the root *h2au- ~ *h2u-, which otherwise gives words and
particles largely denoting binary opposition (and..and,
or..or, also, etc.: Ved. u "also", va: "or", Av. uta "also",
Grk. aû "on the other hand", aûte "again", Lat. aut "or",
-ve "or", German auch "also", etc.)
>Surely it is found also in Tocharian
I don't think as a demonstrative.
>, and perhaps somewhere else. There are fewer traces of demonstrative *mo, but they exist in Anatolian (Lycian me), Indo-Aryan (as long as I know, only in Singhalese) and perhaps in Celtic.
I'm familiar with the Celtic forms Bomhard mentions under
roots 555 (*ma, *mu demonstrative) and 524 (*mi, *ma
interrogative, relative). Not very convincing.
>At last, a very good Nostratic similarity is found in Turkic, where (e.g., in Kazakh, but also in many
>other languages) a demonstrative bu "this" forms its oblique cases with a stem mu- (gen. mu-nyng, dat. mu-ghan, acc. mu-ny etc.).
This is the same variation as in the Altaic 1st. person
pronoun *bi, *min-, pl. [Mong-Tung] *bu/*ba, *mun-/*man-.
The usual development *mw- > *b(w)- is reversed or blocked
by a following /n/.
The PA accusative ending *-ba [I incorrectly gave that as
*-b earlier] comes from the pronoun *bu ~ *bwa, which in
turn derives from the PN pronoun *mu- [*ma-]. This is an
interrogative in Afro-Asiatic, Uralic and Kartvelian, and a
demonstrative in Altaic and Kartvelian. I haven't studied
the particulars in enough detail to be sure, but my gut
feeling is that the interrogative usage is original and the
demonstrative secondary. In any case, it doesn't matter all
that much to the connection between the pronoun *mu-/*ma-
and the accusative ending *-m(w)a, which we can make in
either case.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...