From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 32846
Date: 2004-05-21
>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Rob" <magwich78@...> wrote:Agreed.
>
>> Is the genitive *dem-s reconstructed solely on the basis of Gk.
>> despóte:s, or is there other evidence?
>
>The gen. form is seen in Avestan d&:n.g paitis^ and Vedic pátir dán,
>both reflecting IIr. */dans pati-s./ or the reverse. The short vowel
>is safe for the Indic form, but only Greek shows it was an /e/.
>Still, that is generally the way reconstruction works, so it seems
>to be *déms and very definitely is *dVNs (with a short vowel
>followed by a nasal consonant).
>> It seems that the 'house' root is tricky indeed. How do youExcept, as I said, that's not quite the full story. The
>explain
>> the contrast between e- and o-vocalism?
>
>It has become a classic in the literature on acrostatic paradigms
>and rootnouns alike. The doctrine says that acrostatic paradigms
>have é in their weak forms, as 3sg middle Ved. stáve 'is invoked' as
>opposed to a long vowel in strong forms, as 3sg act.
>stáuti 'invokes'. This is "Narten ablaut",
>and there are nouns doingAlmost all of them, in fact.
>the same, as Gk. hêpar, Avest. ya:kar& vs. Skt. yákr.t, yaknás, Lat.
>jecur 'liver', said to reflect *yé:kW-r(t), *yekW-n- (originally,
>the story goes, gen. *yékW-n.-s, then *yekW-n-ós by normalization).
>Some nouns
>, however, show /o/ instead of /é:/ in the strong forms.Agreed so far.
>The nominative to go with *dem-s definitely has an o-vowel, cf. Arm.
>nom.-acc.sg. tun, and 'night' has *nókWt- all over except in Hitt.
>nekuz which is diagnozed as a genitive, this leading to *nókWt-s,
>gen. *nékWt-s, and the model of which one may also take the
>alternant of 'foot' to have been originally distributed as *pó:d-s,
>gen. *péd-s (-> normalized gen. *ped-ós).
>
>I believe we can get all of this regular by positing underlying root-
>vowel length in the acrostatic paradigms. The 3sg act. *sté:w-ti
>needs no further explanation if the stem was *sté:w- all along. It
>weak variant *stéw- may then be a reduction of *pretonic* *ste:w-´
>not unlike the process that led to zero-grade with short-vowel
>roots. There is the difficulty, of course, that the accent is not on
>the ending, but I assume it once was. That assumption, i.e. a
>prestage such as gen. *pe:d-ós, offers a reason for the shortening
>of the root vowel, and I do not think it is as bold as it might
>look. For, when the reduction of unaccented vowels has changed *pe:d-
>ós to *ped-ós, it has changed structures with short vowels into
>monosyllables, as gen. *H2ner-ós (*H2ner- 'man', Gk. ané:r) > PIE
>*H2n.r-ós. At that stage words of normal structure had become
>phonological monosyllables with only one full vowel.
>The "acrostatic" type however had only shortened its long pretonic
>vowel to a short pretonic vowel. Now we need a rule that puts the
>accents right. I think it's free of charge: pretonic vowels are
>accented. That is the same as saying initial accent, accent on the
>first full vowel of every word. Since all pretonic short vowels have
>been lost, there remain only the reduced products of originally long
>vowels to operate on, so if "initial accent" is introduced, we get
>the accent right. That gives us *péd-os. One might like to leave it
>at that, given the Greek and Sanskrit genitive podós, padás, but the
>existence of genitives like *dem-s, *nékWt-s, *gWéw-s (or *gWów-s),
>and 3pl forms like Ved. táks.ati, s'á:sati reflecting *-nti without
>the vowel of the desinence /-ent/ show that the desinential segments
>were subsequently reduced. So we have to assume just that: the stage
>*péd-os was reduced to *péd-s, which is the structure seen in some
>archaic forms, while others adjusted the form to the normal type
>with accented endings, so that *ped-ós is in all probability the
>correct PIE reconstruction for this particular lexeme.
>The strong paradigm forms should then be based on structures with aAhem. There's plenty of them. A sample from Jasanoff pp.
>long vowel in the root segment. But we often find an o-vowel, as
>in 'house', 'foot' and 'night'. There are no verbs of this kind
>, so it looks like a thing that could arise only in nouns. There are noWhat does it matter whether they are root nouns or not? The
>neuter root-nouns like this either
>(not many of any other kind,This is of course a sub-optimal explanation, as it fails to
>however, I practically know only 'heart', but that's a footnote), so
>I would suggest that the o-timbre has been caused by the nominative
>lengthening. If we expect the product of *pé:d-s in the nominative
>and find *pó:d-s, is it then not the most sensible thing to ask if
>*pó:d-s could be the product of *pe:d-s (*pé:d-z if we need a
>special sibilant)? I guess it is, and the necessary assumption is
>quite easy: *pé:d-s underwent lengthening, and the additional length
>in the already-long vowel caused it to assume o-timbre.
> dial. Pol. (Wielkopolska, etc.) /o/, Dutch /a:/ > /A:/,/O:/ in many dialects (e.g. Amsterdam), etc. etc.).