Rob:
> If I may ask, where is the evidence for 3sg *-d?
Final Voicing predicts that it must have happened. However, the
ultimate pattern I see is that the original voicelessness is
put back if it has a non-final suffix to base an analogy on. So
while Final Voicing predicts non-indicative 3ps *-d, the indicative
*-ti and imperative *-tu were sure to have backformed a comparatively
bizarre *-d back to *-t. However, inanimate *-d, being strictly in
final position, had no alternative as the 3ps did to bring it back
to *-t. So it stayed as it was.
Jens has tried to confuse the issue by making up IE as he goes
along. I don't feel that his Latin /idem/ ~ Sanskrit /idam/
shows medial *d in IE since there is no IE form to explain these
two. Rather, I think they are faux ami considering that many
pronouns in Sanskrit end in -am (aham, vayam, ayam, yuyam,
everything-am) and also considering that in Latin we have /ea-dem/,
the feminine of /i-dem/ showing that the word cannot be logically
segmented into *id-em as he was trying to claim in order to give
me hypertension.
So the pattern holds, *-t and *-s become voiced unless analogy
with medial forms of such endings come along to change it back.
With *-s, the added complication is that there was never a *z-phoneme
as Jens insists in my view, only a z-allophone of *s. Therefore, *-s
should become [-z] while still remaining the phoneme *s.
There is of course still the issue of whether "final voicing" is
a common enough phenomenon to be allowed for IE or what. I've
managed to find it only in Lezghian so far so I'm at a loss to
say anything against that arguement other than that my theory
is allowed to have ONE strange feature about it for Jens' five.
> On Piotr Gasiorowski's website, he lists aorists "derived from
> duratives" as having an accented thematic vowel. I think that
> perhaps all original aorists were this way. E.g. there was a basic
> distinction between *bheugt "is/was fleeing" and *bhugét "escaped."
> The durative forms had the accent shifts typical of the athematic
> paradigm, while the aorist forms kept the stress on the "suffix"
> (otherwise, the plural aorist and durative forms would have been the
> same).
This is where a subjunctive origin looks good right now. Afterall
that's what it looks like, doesn't it? The aorist often describes
what seems like a past tense occurence, although technically it's
supposed to describe an action as a whole or a completed action or
series of actions without reference to its frame of time. Speakers
of IE would naturally use aorists as "past tense" although a true
'aorist' doesn't necessarily have to be in the past. The action could
just as well happen any time.
A subjunctive describes a hypothetical event as in "If it _were_
to happen" or "I _would_ go to school (if)...". Now it's easy
even in English to confuse a subjunctive "If it were" with
a past form "If it was". The two are synonymous with only subtle
shades of difference.
This is how I think the thematic aorist developped and *bHug-é-t
would originally have meant "he would escape", not "he escaped".
You can also think of it this way: A hypothetical action or
actions without reference to timeframe shifts to a _real_ action
again without reference to timeframe. It's a subtle shift of
meaning, n'est-ce pas? Afterall, we sometimes do this with
"I _would_ go to the cinema five times a week" (a subjunctive-esque
phrase used for a naturally aorist action), equivalent to "I went
to the cinema five times a week" (more aorist in nature), both
speaking of a _real_ and completed occurence of a series of actions
without reference to a specific timeframe.
This is what I think finally-accented aorists come from. The root
aorists though are, I feel, the original pattern such as with *dohW-t
which show an athematic stem with durative-ish endings. My intuition
tells me that the aorist runs all the way back to IndoTyrrhenian and
that if Tyrrhenian (> Etruscan, Lemnian, Rhaetic, Camunic,
EteoCypriot and Minoan) preserves any verbal system at all, it would
show remnants of a durative-aorist-perfect system.
> The ancient accent distinction had become a relic, with new
> inflections being the temporal augments (*e- and *-i),
While *e- is surely late and dialectal, I'm not so sure about
indicative *-i now which I've had to place before Final Voicing
in eLIE. It would however be after Syncope, so it's "relatively
new" but not as new by any means as the past augment.
> the sigmatic aorist, reduplication, etc.
The sigmatic-aorist at least in _noun_ form may not be new
while I agree that it's use in verbs is later or originally
secondary (that is, non-intrinsic to the verbal system at the
time). Reduplication though? Bite your tongue. The *i-reduplcation
maybe, since I've pinpointed its origin. It is the result of
prestress mLIE *& becoming *i (thus *bH&-bér- > *bHi-bHér-)
which also explains the change of *o to *i in compounds and then
finally the *i-adjectives that derive from that last phenomenon.
However, I think that perfect reduplication of the form *bHe-bHor-
is very very ancient and is a corrupt version of the simple
*bir-bir- type of reduplication that would exist in ProtoSteppe.
> In this light, I think it's at least possible that the
> conservative-accented thematic paradigm (e.g. *bhéromi) was a
> later innovation.
No. I think that despite the later regularized accent on the
initial, the thematic durative represents the oldest form of the
durative the best. Rather I am suspicious of *es-mi, *ei-mi,
*wes-mi, *ed-mi, etc.
> Yes, I do get it. The form *wlkWos, with syllabic (zero-grade) *l,
> surely means that it was earlier ending-accented: *wlkWós. Any
> thoughts as to why the accent was retracted? It again seems like a
> case of paradigmatic levelling to me, but beyond that I cannot yet
> see anything.
Nominalization of a descriptive adjective.
> This seems reasonable to me. Combinations of three (let alone more)
> consonants seem to be very rare in historically reconstructed PIE.
> To my knowledge, in such combinations (where they occur), at least
> one member is a resonant or *s (as in the sigmatic aorist).
Not necessarily. What about a substantivized verb in the accusative
like, say, *wolgt-m? (I had to think hard for that one so don't
laugh at me.)
> Inserting unknown vowels gives us *walakWa.
Egad, we see by the zero-grade and deviant accent that we don't
have the right to apply these rules here.
> 2. Genitive adjectives, which I believe could encompass nominals of
> the -tó, -nó, -ró types.