Re: [tied] Bader's article on *-os(y)o

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen <jer@...>
wrote:

> My logic would tend to say the opposite. The inherited plural

formations

> of German, Danish or Welsh are totally unpredictable now. Each word

must

> be learnt by itself.

What I meant was that plurality as it exists in IE languages today
did not exist as such in PIE when it first became established as an
independent language.

> Not in the world of my dreams, no. But I'm afraid there very much

is such

> a thing as too far back for us to be able to understand it at the

present

> time. We move one step at a time.

Right.

> In vo:x, IE *wó:kW-s, I believe the root vowel was long already in
> the underlying form. This is one of the canonical root-noun types
> with a specifically iterative shade in tis semantics. I credit the
> length to the meaning; it's iconic lengthening, already in the
> input.

Iconic lengthening? Explain.

> Szemerényi gives a rundown of older theories accounting for the
> nominative lengthening, but it is all very silly. I can only
> observe that it looks as if the nominative marker imparted length
> on its nearest preceding vowel (but not when it was contiguous with
> it). It it were only the nom. *-s (**-z?) one could take it to be a
> dose of sonority, but the same effect is shown by the collective
> marker *-H2, which was [x]. So it may just be the natural length of
> a spirant that is redistributed in the word.

I can also see this as a possibility.

> I was over this with Miguel a while back. There are quite a few

examples

> in Hittite, and the type may have become productive in Tocharian.

Greek

> has a handful of items; /e:khó:/ (PGk. *wa:khó:) 'echo' must be the

best

> known word of that type.

All right.

> I'm all for 2. But who am I to tell? The 3rd person marker, by the

way,

> would seem to have been /nt/ (or a monophonemic consonant

containing these

> features). That would also avoid the problem of a clash between *-t

in 2sg

> and 3sg. But this is a can of worms again, good grief.

Perhaps at first the 2sg form was *-t, 3sg *-0. Then /-t/ > /-s/,
giving 2sg *-s vs. 3sg *-0. Finally, 3sg *-t came from *-to, from
demonstrative *to- (or perhaps when it was still *ta- or something
similar) with apocope of the vowel.

> > The form *(x)ákmons seems to be possible only after the earlier
> > penultimate stress rule (as Glen and I hypothesize) disappeared.
>
> Yes, that rule was designed to predict the *lexical* accent of

stems,

> wasn't it? That would fit, for this is younger than the lexical

assignment

> of the accent position.

Right. This means that the root form had already been established as
*xak before the suffix (presumably *-man) was added. However, why
didn't the accent shift due to the syllabic suffix?

> Sure, "*(x)ákmons" is more recent than "*(x)ákmens" of which it

will be

> the direct continuation.

Is *(x)ákmens attested anywhere?

> I do not know. I see no complementary distribution in formal terms.

But

> it's a bit funny there are *no inanimate oxytones*. There are no

neuters

> with a stressed suffix *-és or *-mén. So perhaps it is an original
> opposition of animacy?? In that case its reflexes are perhaps not

in a

> very clean distribution in PIE anymore.

Hmm. It suggests to me that something drew the accent to the suffix
in the animate forms. Beyond that, I cannot tell yet.

I think diachronicity is important for reconstructing these
soundlaws -- we need to pinpoint, to the best of our ability, when
different sound changes began and ended.

- Rob