Jens:
> By the time of PIE *yo would have agreed with *pode in
> gender and number.
Me:
> Yes, but not in mLIE and previous layers.
Jens again:
> You don't know any of this, you are only issuing decrees
> [gLeN: hmm, the double standard continues] wothout any
> basis for them. Incidentally, you are dismissing the obvious
> for no apparent reason other than fear of joining the enemy.
Interesting. So you see this as an irritating power struggle
of 'us' versus 'them', friend versus enemy, whereas I'm just
interested in the logical flow or lack thereof of ideas presented
on the Forum. I'm sorry if I'm your enemy. Pax. Chill, dude :)
Again more of the 'decree' rhetoric, I see, but you issue them
all the time ironically.
> The obvious interpretation is that the relative was a relative
> and that it was originally inflected, but gave it up.
Hmm. I'm listening... Gave it up? Hmm...
> That's what univerbated concatenations tend to do over time.
> The form generalized may well be the nominative singular
> masculine. That is, *wl.kWos-yo H1donts "the wolf's tooth" may
> have originally meant "the tooth which (is) the wolf's". The
> nom.sg.masc. was of course not *-yo, but *-yos, so we have to
> assume that the final *-s was lost.
Listen to yourself: '... so we have to ASSUME that the final
*-s was lost.' No thanks, Jens. We don't have to assume anything.
All you're doing is extending Common IE morphology to the far
reaches of pre-IE with careless, superficial analysis. Your theory
is missing a lot for that, I think. Then, to add insult to your
uncontrolled assumptions, you want us to accept a 'dissimilatory
loss in *te-s-yo-s to *te-s-yo' based on a flawed etymology
of *so laced with phonemic *z's that aren't even necessary to
explain one iota of IE phenomena. And then this only begs a
junkyard of more unnecessary questions like why dissimilation
here, why not elswhere? It's a waste of time and pointlessly wild
conjecture for no gain. Unnecessary, unnecessary, unnecessary.
Even more unnecessary than my repeating "unnecessary" many times
over :P
With words like *muhsos 'of the mouse', *nebHesos 'of the clouds',
etc. clearly wrong. Hands down. It couldn't be more obvious here
that there is no dissimilatory process and never was a nominative
*-s in *so. Why continue the charade?
> That will permit us to integrate the vocalism -o- into a frame we
> already have.
As I mentioned, I had erred and meant to write *a which is the
origin of *o by Vowel Shift. Regardless, Jens, we start with what
we KNOW. We don't start with assumption as you did above so
anything I say on this can only be a better solution.
So let's start at the beginning again. We see that there were such
things as endingless locatives in IE. The locative *-i is most
often believed to be a deictic in origin because of similarity
with *i-. Since other suffixes like nominative *-s, indicative
*-i, inanimate *-d, the genitive ending in *-yo and 3ps *-t can
all be shown to derive from deictics, we already have a sturdier
theoretical matrix to work within than an immediately self-
contradictory "s-dissimilation" that doesn't serve to explain
much at all.
So locatives were once endingless as the data suggests and the
locative in *-i derives from *i, an endingless demonstrative
of *is which was later replaced by a clearly more synthetic
and recent *e-sm-oi.
The analysis of indicative *-i as from the same locative *i
further substantiates the pattern since 'here, at this time'
is what the morpheme was trying to convey. Again, this makes
sense phonetically, semantically and grammatically.
Likewise then, we have a thematic genitive in *-s-yo which
obviously took over when the expected genitive **-os would
have clashed with the nominative. So the *-yo here was
without a shadow of a doubt applied to dissimilate it from
the nominative. What is *-yo? The only acceptable answer is
from relative *yo-, which we both thankfully agree on.
So which do you think is a more sensible solution at this
point? One that assumes without establishing a NON-contradicting
pattern that *s went 'bye-bye' just in this sole case out of
nothing but convenience? Or one that is based on what is an
overwhelmingly clear and non-contradicting pattern of endingless
locatives and suffixed deictics in pre-IE? There is no contest.
Your theory falls. In fact, the only reason why you could possibly
hold on to such a weak view is if you were the one afraid of
'siding with the enemy'. A matter of pride rather than reasoning.
How joyously human.
Now with your theory not being a relevant issue for the unresolvable
issues above, we are left with only mine. The simple attachment of
an unchanged stem *ya (as seen in some of the above cases) to the
noun suffices to explain the vocalism. Afterall *ya- is also the
parent form of *yo- at this stage according to Vowel Shift. No big
problem here. Since the vocalism is unablauted/unreduced, we might
question why *a didn't disappear like in nominative *-s but the
answer is clear: The application of *-ya is necessarily long after
Syncope for not only the purposes of this theory but because
thematic stems could only logically develop homophonous nominatives
and genitives AFTER Syncope. Before this time, the nominative and
genitive, both ending in *-sa, were always distinguished by accent
(shown by QAR) but stems with accented thematic vowel had developped
in eLIE out of Nominative Misanalysis of genitival nouns. Genitive
nouns are parallel with those in Etruscan and other Tyrrhenian
languages.
While thematic stems with initial accent would have been logically
able to distinguish these cases by accent alone (eg: *bHár&-s
vs *bHará-s), those stems with final accent (say, *bHará-s vs
homophonous *bHará-s) would absolutely require *-ya to make
that contrast. Thus *bHará-s-ya. The lack of reduction is
unproblematic under Stage II Phonotactics since this stage of
Late IE allows not only initial weak syllables in a strong form
of a stem, but also unreduced vowels in unstressed positions.
The gradual erosion of ablaut processes exemplified by unablauted
stems like *suxnu- and *wlkWo- of Stage III previously mentioned
was already beginning by the time of the new genitive in *-s-ya.
While old morphemes continued to ablaut out of firm tradition,
new ones were evidently no longer required to. Since the lack of
expected reduction in *-ya mirrors what we see in *suxnu- and
*wlkWo-, we have established another firm pattern, one of Stage
II and III Phonotactics. Hence unablauted *-ya is a regular Stage
III outcome rather than what we'd otherwise expect according to
Stage I morphophonology, **-y&.
Acrostatic Regularization occurs after the application of
demonstrative *ya to the genitive. AR affected the accent of
thematic nominal and verbal stems. It is the marker of Stage III
Phonotactics, the point when ablaut was no longer a productive
process of word formation. Since Acrostatic Regularization
affected all thematic stems of nouns and verbs, thematic stems
with initial accent versus those with accent on the final merged
into a single class. So too did the genitives with *-syo being
a new norm for all thematics. Of course, analogy could always
keep the flames of ablaut alive for a long while after, but
we also see by example how forms contrary to ablaut were later
concurrently allowed to exist.
= gLeN