--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Sergejus Tarasovas"
<S.Tarasovas@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Mate Kapovic" <mkapovic@...>
wrote:
>
> > I forgot to mention. I would reconstruct Slavic dar7 as an old u-
> stem
> > *deh3rus because of the accentuation in Croatian.
>
> This resembles Sl. *mirU (~ *me^rU) 'peace etc.' ( < *me/oiH-ru-
(?) <
> *meiH- 'soft'), which seems to belong to the u-declension and at
the
> same time to the mobile paradigm (it's mobile in Standard Russian
at
> least).
I think you are both right. Kolesov (Istorija russkogo udarenija 1,
Leningrad 1972) gives the words in a list a original u-stems that
have ended up belonging to accent class c. The evidence for u-stem
formation is overwhelming with darU, less so with mirU. Then it is
the u-stem form that has guided the words into their accent class,
and I should not have cited darU as a neuter-turned-masculine in the
context at hand which was about o-stems.
I'm afraid this reopens an old can of worms. I see two mutually
exclusive ways of accounting for the stem-formation *-ru-:
1. Either *-ru is the (immediate) postaccent variant of *-ró-, just
as we have an alternation between -tu- right after the accent as
opposed to *-tó- under the accent, as in Vedic sótu- 'act of
pressing' : ppp sutá- 'pressed'. The may lead us to postulate an
adjective *d&3-ró- (not retained anywhere to my knowledge) formed
just like Ved. ugrá-, ji:rá- etc., to which we may expect a
substantival form *dóH3-ru- which would then survive as Slavic darU.
The Greek form dôron would then have adopted the stem vowel of the
adjective. The old gender would be neuter, so the IE form would be
*dóH3ru. The survival of neuter u-stems as masculine in Slavic seems
unproblematic since the language has no u-stem neuter class in its
grammar.
2. Or *-ru is the regular syllabification of original *-wr, the nom.-
acc. of a *-wer-/-wen-stem, which may even be the basis of Lith.
dovanà and the verbal noun formations with *-wVn- from this root
seen in Ved. da:váne and Greek dowénai, doûnai 'to give'. If this is
the basis the connection with Gk. dôron seems to disappear. The
Greek word could still have been created by scenario 1, only then we
do not have the Slavic word to support it. The PIE form would also
be neuter *dóH3ru in this case.
I see no way of combining adjectival *-ro- with substantival *-wr >
*-ru as morphological classes, no matter how appealing it may seem
in a case like this.
Jens