--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:
> 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.
I strongly resent the insinuation that I am deliberately derailing
the debate. I do not base much on the congruity of idem and idám,
but they are facts of related languages. The old handbooks that duly
record the correspondence should not be looked down upon in scorn;
they were written by people who knew the languages well and could
find such gems.
> 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.
Resegmentation was not an unknown phenomenon to researchers a
century ago, why should it be to us? Anyone can see that in the
accusative *kWi-m 'whom, anyone' the nasal marked the accusative and
could not possibly belong to the stem. Still, Greek did not care
about the hypertension it would later cause when it used ti-n- as a
stem and formed a new accusative tín-a, with genitive tinós, tiní.
There must be others who have heard or read about these facts.
Anyone who hasn't should learn. The -am part that many pronouns end
with should also be considered when trying to account for the facts
of the language. You cannot insinuate that Wackernagel did not know
where to cut the Indic pronouns when he compared -am with the -em of
Latin -dem regarding it as the product of a resegmentation of id-em,
which he suggested be equated with id-ám.
Jens