Re: [tied] Re: IE lexical accent

On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 enlil@... wrote:

> Alscher's site in fact inspired me ...

People have been thrown in jail for less.

> While I think that there is a very remote
> genetic affiliation with Semitic, the real reasons for the perfect
> have to come from comparisons with closer language groups like
> Tyrrhenian, Uralic, Altaic and EA to make any sense of this.

Oh, please, let's hear about it.

>
> What is transparent to me, as opposed to Jens, is that the vowels
> _are_ supposed to be there. There's nothing wrong with them because
> they reflect eLIE unaccented *a in final position. I've already
> stated in numerous examples that Suffix Resistance normally prevents
> monosyllabic suffixes from losing their vowel during Syncope.

There are many asyllabic endings in IE, and you derive them quite
consistently from full syllables. Is this Suffix Resistance of yours so
tough that there are no rules to predict when it works and when not?

> So the
> perfect endings were no exception.

Well, how could there be exceptions to non-rules?

> Also, the 2ps *-txe cannot be
> original because it violates earlier phonotactics. Instead it seems
> that analogy with 1ps *-xe worked on it to produce a rhyming *-txe.

So the laryngeal is not original, but the vowel is? Who told you?

> We should end up with MIE perfect endings *-he, *-te, *-e in the
> singular. What Jens is confused about is what the parallels are in
> Uralic et al.

I'm afraid that's not all I find confusing right now.

> That's actually simple once we see that there was a
> shift in semantic usage of the endings. The perfect endings here all
> contain *-e, an attached deictic used as a transitivizing marker.

That could indeed be the explanation. In case the *-e represents a word of
its own it would be like the primary marker *-i which does not influence
the ablaut. Is this a principle that can be generalized to all your fine
examples of Suffix Resistance which I understand works only for some of
the desinences?

> Originally, the perfect endings were _intransitive_ endings and thus
> used often times with statives.

What does "*with* statives" mean? Do you mean they *were* statives?

> There's the connection. Once they
> were marked with *-e, they served the new function of perfect-stative
> regardless of transitivity.

So *-e is a *marker* of irrelevance? And the *-e means "don't bother to
look for the object"? That would be an antipassive; where else do we find
that? If we don't how do you know that this is what it was?

> The early IndoTyrrhenian intransitive set *[-ah, -at, (-a)] relate to
> intransitives in Boreal, ancestral to Uralic and EA, where *-h was
> replaced with either *-N or *-k (the jury of mine is still out on which
> one).
>
> In that way, these underlying intransitives can be linked to prefixed
> stative morphemes in AfroAsiatic (in a sense) but that's like linking
> English pronouns directly with those in Pashto. It's a mess to sort out
> without knowing the in-betweens.

What in-betweens moved them to desinential position in Indo-European?

Jens