Jens:
> I agree completely with the basic principle in this, viz. that the
> accent is automatic with respect to its distance from the end. I
> disagree on three points: [...]
Alright, here we go.
> 1. The accent is *final*, not penultimate or quasi-so.
Asyllabic affixes derived from syllabic morphemes are common
enough to see. We have to recognize a pattern in IE considering
that:
1. animate nominative *-s is related to *so
2. inan.nominoaccusative *-d is related to *to-
3. 3ps *-t(-i) is related to *to-
4. aorist *-s- is related to substantives in *-es-
However, this contradicts the possibility of your final accent and
forces us to accept penultimate accent in many instances. Whilst you
will warp Uralic to suit your own needs, you know damn well that, in
the mainstream, its accusative consists of more than just consonant
*-m. There's a vowel there too. Same thing with all Uralic endings.
Anything else would destroy the phonotactics of that language.
> 2. It is the distance from the end of the *stem*, not the end of the
> word that counts in this.
If this were the case, we shouldn't have *?s-énti, but we do. So either
IEists still don't have a grasp of its simple grammar, or your statement
must be fundamentally flawed.
> 3. I guess we also differ when I say that the accent movement seen in
> paradigms works on the basis of this, and that it is separated from
> the lexical accent assignment by an intervening event of *anaptyxis*
> which creates some of the vowels to which the accent can subsequently
> move.
Using anaptyxis is mad considering that we _know_ that there was Syncope
in the past by other examples. So rather than inventing new excuses, we
take Syncope to its natural limit and realize that vowelless endings
like *-m and *-s derive from unaccented-vowel-enriched preforms *-am and
*-as, just as *gnh- is the result of a stressless version of *genh-.
There is an association between lack of stress and vowel dropping.
For your theory to operate at all, you need to assert that asyllabic
morphemes are NOT from syllabic antecedents which gets absurd
considering the list above. Sadly, it doesn't address anything because
you're merely restating what the accent rule is in IE as if it should be
reconstructed for all stages of pre-IE. But what then is reason for the
asyllabic morphemes. They must surely have had vowels before and so what
then was the rule _at THAT stage_?? (Prediction: Jens will say "we
cannot know", whereupon I will think "Load of horse doodoo").
The reason for the asyllabic morphemes is Syncope, plain and simple. So
the accent naturally will not be found in those syllables except when
later analogies apply to rework the former accent. We need no special
prop-vowel. If one may derive *pertu-s from an MIE form, we'd expect
*pértau-sa and this would fully explain it. The genitive would be
*partéu-sa and this would fully explain *prtéus. The former pattern now
is more regular. We can see that accent shift is fully predictable
by QAR; we see that *e becomes *a when unaccented; we see that all
instances of *a are dropped after Syncope; we also see that the
nominative ending *-sa is related to the free form *sa (> *so). This is
a much clearer account of pre-IE than you have offered.
> I do not accept the derivation of the nom. *-s from a syllable *-so,
> nor of the pronominal neuter *-d from a syllable *-to, but even if I
> did it would not matter.
It would matter. You would no longer be able to assert final accentuation
and you'd be more in line with my penultimate solution. This is why you
deny it so stubbornly.
> I do not thereby exclude that they are ultimately independent words,
> indeed I have analyzed *gWhén-m 'I kill' as "a killer (am) I";
Lame. We don't need this conjecture. It suffices as an athematic verb.
The end.
> I see a potential support for this in their being also just single
> consonants in Uralic (Finnish -n, -t).
These endings ARE all syllabic. Ask a Uralicist if you've forgotten.
= gLeN