--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> It occurred to me this morning that I don't know how one would
> express "The eye which the wolf has" in PIE. Perhaps it's just my
> ignorance, but I can't think of the PIE for 'to have'!
This is a hotly debated issue. A certain school of IE studies is
adamant that IE, at least at an early stage, did not have any verb
for "have". I do not like to make believe that I am more sure about
earlier stages than about later ones, so I don't feel I can be so
sure. If there was no verb, one way of expressing quite certainly
was to use the genitive. So the construction would be "the eye which
is the wolf's". What a person "has" is combined with that person in
nthe genitive, including some archaic constructions with a
participle used in an ergative-like manner which look the same in
Indo-Iranian and Lithuanian. So there is very good reason to insist
that at least a construction <<*wlkWosyo-yos *H3รณ:kWs>> meant "the
eye which is of the wolf", i.e. "the eye which the wolf has".
Now, if this *construction* is older than its (renewed) form, the
same syntax will be at play in case <<*wlkW-os yo H3o:kW-s>> once
also meant "the eye which is the wolf's", i.e. "the eye which the
wolf has". That makes one sympathetic towards the interpretation of
the form *yo as an old nominative. Of course, what the wolf has does
not have to be always a thing named by a masculine singular word. It
could be of any gender and any number, so *yo would be used as a
common representative of the relative pronoun as such. It most of
all looks like a case of inflection reduction as we see later in
many periphrastic constructions.
I have some reservations towards the doctrine that IE had no
verb 'have'. When such verbs are later created by the daughter
languages, the strategies used are *very* similar, typically
involving a stative derivative from a verb meaning 'take' or 'hold'.
The high degree of unanimity also demands an explanation and can
only get one if the process had been at least on its way before the
languages split.
Jens