Firstly, some
more thoughts on pronominal j-stems.
Miguel
wrote:
> The Anlaut of Goth. <jains>,
German <jener>, Eng. <yonder>
> suggests a development out of
the relative/interrogative
> stem *yo-.
Really,
German <jener> "this" is to be devided as je-n-er, cf. je-d-er
"that". Here -n- and -d- are connected with Slavic o-nU and tU, aren't
they? Hence, it is not necessary that the initial j- had ever had any
demonstrative meaning at all. Originally here was nothing but a syntactic
composition of two pronouns (a relative and a demonstrative): *yo- no-
"this which". Therefore, no definite traces of demonstrative use of
the relative *jo exists in Germanic.
From this
viewpoint, even the Balto-Slavic facts are more important. But, as you write,
they can be made of the originally demonstrative *i-s as well. So it seems that
really there is no IE group where development of a realative/interrogative
pronoun into a demonstrative/personal one would exist.
Piotr:
> Just a couple of centuries ago
Polish <on> was still used as a
> demonstrative (more or less =
'this, that' without much distal force),
> while <ten> 'this here'
and <ów> 'that over there' were used to express
> proximity
or distance (traces of *sI could be found only in fixed
> expressions,
like <do siego roku> still used for 'happy New Year', but
> not
really understood).
In Old
Russian (or in the Russian variation of Curch Slavonic - I don't know exactly)
<on> was used as a demonstrative as well. And it was even declined with
the same stem in all the cases, e.g. Gen. <onago>, Dat. <onomu>
etc.
Also traces of
*sI are still in use in Russian, perhaps under Church Slavonic influence. They
are considered as archaic, of course, but are still well understood, and new
expressions with them can freely be bilt, for example, even in modern poetry,
where they have a certain stylistic function. Does anybody know: where is this
*sI from? I could not find any connected demonstrative forms in other IE
branches, although in other Nostratic ones they surely exist (e.g., in
Uralic).
>> This is the system of
Church Slavonic, but the Proto-Slavic was wider.
>> Some more traces
of *vU: Rus. vot "here is...", von "there is..." <
>> *vU-tU, vU-nU.
> Isn't this prothetic *v before *o? Cf.
Polish <ot>, <oto> 'here is',
> archaic <ono>,
<owo> 'there is'.
In litterary
Russian prothetic <v-> doesn't exist anywhere. It is found in some dialects, of course,
but I don't think that <vot>, <von> could have been borrowed from
them. So, there is no reason to assume, as Miguel does, that "the v- is not
etymological".
Miguel:
> I wasn't trying to establish
any law on denasalization of
> initial consonants. I was merely
noting the fact (shown
> above), that initial *m- in the 1st. sg./pl.
pronoun and in
> the demonstrative (*bu) only occurs if an /n/
follows. The
> Proto-Altaic etyma had *b(w)-.
Proto-Altaic had a suppletive
system, where the nominative had *b-, and the oblique cases had *m- (and perhaps
also *ng-, attested in Mong. na- and Old Jap. a).
==========
Vadim
Ponaryadov