Rob:
> Speaking of which, could you explain again where the original
> distinction between thematic and athematic nouns come from, in your
> opinion?
It's changed a lot in the past year. I now think that there were
always thematic and athematic nouns in IE. IE *wodr "water" and
*xewi- "bird" would derive from eMIE *wat:en and *hewai while
*oxuyom "egg" was from MIE *hawayana (technically 'thematic').
However both had the _same_ endings in their declensional endings
right up until the last period of pre-IE when things changed.
What you're asking about is when thematic and athematic declension
became different. That I believe occured during early Late IE
(c.5000 BCE). By this time most (but not all) thematic nouns became
athematic because of loss of MIE unstressed *-a (aka Syncope). Some
words in participle *-na- (> *-no-) survived via the Suffix Resistance
exception of Syncope or through phonotactic repair of otherwise
'odd' syllables. Other thematic nouns were created only in eLIE such
as those caused by Nominative Misanalysis of genitival nouns in
*-os and *-om as new nominative animates in *-o-s and nominoaccusative
inanimates in *-o-m. This was the start of adjectival declension
which coincidentally adopted an animate *-s and inanimate *-m.
When the thematic nominative was going to collide with a potentially
identical plural and genitive singular, the plural kept its vowel *e
unexpectedly to compensate and the genitive took on a new ending
*-s-ya with postposed endingless locative *ya "at which" (> *yo-).
The same retaining of vowel occurs also in the genitive plural
*-o-_o_m to distinguish it from accusative *-o-m.
So eLIE was the start of nominal differentiation of thematic stems
from athematic ones. But verbs are a different story.
The verbs were also always athematic (MIE 3ps *es "is") or thematic
(*kWera >"creates"). In late MIE it became *es-t& and *kWer&.-t&
respectively by affixing demonstrative *ta to the 3ps and 3pp.
Syncope regularly produced *est and *kWer&t (since MIE *a > lMIE *& >
eLIE NULL but MIE *e > lMIE *&. > eLIE *&). Final Voicing caused
voicing of *-t to *-d in final position but not in *-ti where *t
was medial.
Schwa Diffusion in mid Late IE caused lengthening of *& before voiced
segments so *es-t and *kWer-&.-d (yet indicative *kWer-&-ti). During
Schwa Merger of *& to *e and *&. to *a, analogy restored voicelessness
in *-d based on indicative *-ti and the thematic vowel of the indicative
was used in thematic stems. Thus *es-t and *kWer-e-t (based on the
perfectly regular indicative *kWer-e-ti).
Complicated? Yes, I'm afraid so. It can't be any simpler. I tried.
> It seems to me that athematic nouns are from words that did not end
> in vowels (or perhaps only short vowels), while thematic nouns did
> end in vowels (or perhaps long vowels). We know that PIE never had
> an accent scheme that was fixed on the first syllable of a word, due
> to the abundance of initial clusters in the language.
? Do you know about the acrostatic pattern? The thematic stem accent
_was_ regularized to the initial syllable in both verbs and nouns.
So the accent in *bher-o-nti "they give" is on the first syllable
of the _stem_, always. However, on the _suffix_ in athematic *?s-onti
"they are".
In nouns, thematic *wlkWo-s has initial accent, *wlkWosyo "of the wolf"
_still_ has initial accent. Yet athematic *kwon-s and genitive *kun-os,
the latter with _final_ accent. Get it? Thematic stems don't preserve
original accentuation.
That's why I mention the rule of "Acrostatic Regularization" in mid
Late IE that forced the accent firmly on the first syllable in
thematic stems to avoid their accent flip-flops. Athematic nouns
were relatively rarer than thematic nouns and their "flip-flops"
continued on.
So, only athematic accent patterns can show my QAR pattern which
technically now allows MIE to have a penultimate _and_ an
antepenultimate accent (third-to-last syllable).
> Vowel syncope would then cause a seemingly free accent system.
Yes, this is what I try to show.
> However, assuming that thematic nouns derived from roots/stems
> ending in vowels that were not lost to syncope, how did this occur?
Early IE Phonotactic Constraint and Suffix Resistance.
Early IE must have had allowable syllables versus syllables that
weren't allowed in that language. Every language has rules on what
a normal syllable looks like in it but every language is different.
For example, zdr- is normal in Russian but completely unallowed in
English. So I think that in eLIE, one thing that was unallowable
was noun stems that were monosyllabic and ending in a vowel. Only
pronouns like *ta- "that", *ka- "this" *kWa- "which" (interrogative),
*ya- "which" (relative), *e- "him, her, it" and *sa "that" could have
a simple form like CV. Another restriction was having three consonants
in a row. So nouns of an MIE form *CVCCa-sa in the nominative would
have become postSyncope **CV:CC-s (with -CCC!!!) but since it wasn't
allowable, it resulted in a preserved vowel between the stem and
the unexpectedly 'clipped' nominative: *CVCC&-s. Hence some thematic
nouns escaped the Syncope chopping block by Phonotactic Constraint.
One of them might be *gHaido- "goat". Obviously these constaints
changed in IE over time so that *-CCC was later allowable as in
*bHe:r-s-t, the aorist 3ps of "carry".
Suffix Resistance, on the other hand, preserves final vowels in suffixes
of the form -CV which aren't allowed to lose the vowel since it would
cause asyllabicity. Another big no-no. Morphemes must retain their
syllabicity, except in rare exceptions such as nominative *-sa > *-s,
3ps *-ta > *-t/*-t-i and inanimate *-ta > *-t > *-d. Those exceptions
I call "Clipping" and seem to _always_ involve suffixes derived from
postfixed demonstratives.
= gLeN