Richard:
> *owyom 'egg', presumably originally meaning 'avian', would be an
> example of such an inanimate thematic noun.
Yes. Another "uncountable" collective. It could just as well mean
"eggs" since we usually find more than one nested egg in nature
anyways.
> (The reconstruction needs tidying up - I can't even remember which
> laryngeal the word starts with, and I certainly don't have the
> reconstruction of the 'bird' word - > Latin _avis_ etc. - to hand.)
Well, if it's any consolation, I'm afraid now to side with either.
It seems I get heckled either way! :) One could pick either *h2 or *h3
but my theory still works. So let's just use *x here and fly caution to
the wind.
So the form would properly be *oxuyom (yielding *o:uyom in dialects
that lose laryngeals). Before Vowel Shift and Acrostatic Regularization,
we have *axuyán. The ending is merely what was later the genitive
plural, of course, however the *a- (> *o-) needs explaining to link it
to the "bird" word. My explanation is that *a- was attached in eLIE
during Syncope to repair a strong case stem with a weak initial
syllable that *xuyan displays. This seems to happen with *osdo-
"branch" (<= *sed- "sit") and *okto:u "eight" (<= *kWetwor- "four") as
well which would otherwise be *sda- and *ktwa-. So before this, we have
*xaway-ána, now a straightforward derivative of *xéwai-sa "bird"
(*xewi-s > postIE *awi-s). So:
*xawai-ána lit.'(something) avian' (coined in MIE)
*xuyán Syncope
*axuyán a-Epenthesis
*oxuyom Vowel Shift
Since the discussion about Jens' "infix", I absorbed his idea into
my former a-Prothesis rule and generalized it into a two-part rule
called "a-Epenthesis". This avoids silly R-turning-to-o-infixes
very nicely.
The rule overall was a tactic of the language to repair "bad"
syllables around the time of Syncope (schwa loss). So, prefixing
of *a was preferred but when this was ill-suited to the repair of the
word's syllabics, infixing of *a was the next answer in the next
possible syllable. Prothesis works fine in *osdo- where a form like
*sda- that Syncope and Nominative Misanalysis would produce was
unusual (because monosyllabic thematic 'nominal' stems, stems that
weren't pronominal like *ta- "that", *ka- "this" or *kWa- "which"
were deemed in disrepair). So we get *(?)asda- and everything is
now fine.
For a stem like *hWmiga-, it doesn't work because we get **ahWmiga-
(still with a bizarre string of consonants hW+m+y+g). So the next
syllable was chosen: *hWmaiga- to balance out the syllable shape,
producing a comfortable form in CCVCCV-. Then the laryngeal was
squeezed out to produce *moigo- as we find.
> I thought you yourself gave it as an example a few years ago, but I
> can't find the posting.
Yes. It's modified since that time but hopefully the above will
explain everything until I move back to Winnipeg in the next few
weeks and get my neglected site back up. I've designed it (spiffy I
might add) but haven't worked out the content layout yet.
> The problem here is that Jens does not accept *-om as the genitive
> plural - the evidence for -o:m looks much better.
But it _was_ the a-thematic genitive plural as in *kun-om. What he
doesn't support, I gather, is my analysis of thematic genitive pl
as an non-thematic genitive pl that was vocalically "extended" to
*-o-om avoid merger with accusative in *-o-m. Or at least I think,
but then he's really muddled my views around in these last few posts
so I don't know what he's thinking now.
= gLeN