Peter:
> Of what? Of idem ~ idam? Presumably *id-em, with the same -em as
> we see scattered all over pronouns in Sanskrit (tvam, aham, ayam etc).
Yes, that's my point. "Presumably" being the operative adverb. Why must
we presume anything? We don't have to and you know that as well as I.
There's a reason why **-em isn't considered an IE suffix -- It never
was. I don't grasp how incongruent forms in Latin and Sanskrit justify
an IE reconstruction.
This **-em is only spread across Sanskrit pronouns but we don't see
anything of the sort outside of Indo-Iranian (except 'presumably'
Latin and only restricted to demonstratives).
It's interesting that Sanskrit /aham/ which would show your **-em, as
would all of its other pronouns 'presumably', is related to a Greek
cognate and is known to reflect *egxom. In this instance, it's quite
apparent where the *m-ending comes from, the 1ps thematic non-indicative
*-om, as shown by its indicative variant in *-o:. We've already talked
about how *egxo: may mean "my being here" from *e "here", similar in
development as Inuktitut /uva-Na/ and Aleut /ti-N/ with identical
etymologies.
Now it appears to me that, like many other languages, IE had a bundle
of variants of the 1ps like *eg(x), *egxo:, *ego:, *egom and *egxom.
I can see some stage of "pre-Sanskrit" likewise having a few. Probably
let's say, *aj (< *eg, as reflected in Hittite /uk/) and *aham (<
*egxom, hence Greek /egon/). If so, I can certainly imagine a native
speaker trying to make sense of the *aj/*aham conundrum and misunder-
standing *-am as a special pronominal suffix when it really wasn't
historically. So then, *tuv-am, *id-am, *ay-am, *yuy-am, *vay-am,
etc ensues and forever changes the Sanskrit pronominal system.
While Sanskrit is taken care of, how do we explain Latin then with
/id-em/, /ibid-em/ and /quid-em/? Since I still can't find any
explanation for it from others (whether relating it credibly to IE
or explaining its spread in Latin from a later source), I'll offer
my own idea in the mean time.
I can't help but notice the element *sem in many words like semper
"always" and similis. Of course, we know that the underlying IE root
is *sem- "one, whole, united" and that it must have existed in
pre-Latin. We find *sems attested in Greek /heis/. So it would seem
fairly sensible that a hypothetical *id-sem would mean "that
(particular) one", an emphatic version of simple *id. Likewise we'd
expect *is-sem for the masculine and *ea-sem for the feminine during
some prestage of Latin.
If this were formed before the rhotacization of intervocalic *s, we'd
theoretically end up with *irem, *earem and *idsem but this would make
a disaster out of the paradigm so I can see it levelling out to *idem,
*eadem, *idem since *-r- and *-d- are similar in sound. This then
promotes a faulty new analysis of pronoun + **-dem which spreads
throughout the paradigm, even creating backformed /isdem/.
Just a thought. Any ideas, suggestions or tomato-throwing?
= gLeN