Jens:
> It's been there all the time, and I have myself been silly enough to
> be fooled by it, but I have been through a learning process. I have
> seen that the analysis of the genitive in *-os as a nominative is
> incompatible with the allomorphy of the thematic vowel, so I have
> had to give it up. If some day it turns out to be correct after all
> it will be in spite of the information we have now. Still, that
> cannot be excluded.
Yes, but in your youthful days of naiveté, you no doubt missed the
idea about z-allophony because you were too obsessed with conjuring
up new phonemes that don't exist in IE. As such, the issue you
raise is a smokescreen as it has always been.
The genitive in *-os doesn't even show any thematic vowel. It can't,
unless you want to claim that athematic *kun-os has a hidden thematic
vowel! Doesn't make sense.
So since *kun-os cannot show this thematic vowel you assert, you must
mean the thematic, but oh wait, it's *-e-syo which does show the
thematic vowel, yes, which seems to say that the genitive is unvoiced,
at least in _this_ instance, but that has no bearing on *-os in *kunos
as we see because *kwon- isn't thematic! So *-os represents something
else, not **-&s. It must represent simple thematicless *-as unless
needless assumption has taken control of your brain.
The nominative has *-o-s in the thematic but we only find the nominative
in FINAL position so what help is this? We only see it being voiced
as a result but then we don't know whether it is voiced because it just
is (aka *z is a phoneme) or because this is the rule when it is in final
position.
The inanimate in *-d which must logically come from *to-, just as animate
*-s comes from *so, shows that final voicing is the culprit for all final
phonemes except laryngeals (as proven by animate collective turned
feminine *-ex). That must include *-s. And as I've already shown, the
only cases where we have voiceless stop are the cases where analogy
with medial instances of the morpheme are likely to have spread it there.
The onus remains yours to prove that **z ISN'T an allophone of *s.
= gLeN