Re: [tied] Re: IE lexical accent

From: enlil@...
Message: 33538
Date: 2004-07-15

Jens:
> People have been thrown in jail for less.
>[...]
> Oh, please, let's hear about it.

Somehow my unoffensive credit to Joachim for providing his own
ideas on his website became a basis for more of your unwitty attacks.
And _I'm_ reprimanded for attacking your mentality. Yes, I'm afraid
there is something wrong with your mentality here so you can either
cease this word-vomit or you can continue to degrade yourself. Your
choice.


> There are many asyllabic endings in IE, [...]

No kidding? And yes I derive them all from syllabic endings. There
are etymological considerations that can't be ignored and they show
that the endings were once syllabic. You ignore it so I guess we will
have to agree to disagree. To me the etymologies of these suffixes are
painfully clear but to each his/her/its/he-she's own.

These particular endings may violate Suffix Resistance but they are
regular under Syncope. Also it's transparent that the endings I've
identified are the most common suffixes around in the language. They are
naturally more prone to erosion just like in any other language.


> So *-e is a *marker* of irrelevance? And the *-e means "don't bother to
> look for the object"? That would be an antipassive;

Wrong. Please listen properly. Think about how the language would shift
from a contrast of intransitive/transitive to active/stative for a minute.

There are actually two possibilities, similar but slightly different,
when dealing with the origins of the perfect but I'm sure the perfect
and stative are linked. The question is whether a seperate stative
conjugation can be posited for the latest form of IE or not. Either way,
the IndoTyrrhenian stative 1ps was *-ah (whereupon we must expect IE
*-x as a result) and the perfect was *-ah-e (> *-xe). It is the perfect
that is given the added *-e and this ending cannot be called an
antipassive since we'd expect an _imperfect_ nuance to come from it then,
not to mention that IndoTyrrhenian is an accusative language, not
ergative, for which antipassives would be unlikely.

The *-e is a _transitive_ marker. It makes an intransitive a transitive.
Since I can tell you still don't get it. I'll go step by step very
slowly...


Stage 1: transitive / intransitive

This is the earliest form of IndoTyrrhenian. Here, the
intransitive verbs are still marked by the set *[-a-h, *-a-t, *-a]
while the transitive set is marked by *[-e-m, *-e-s, *-e].
The accompanying "thematic vowel" may be understood as not
technically belonging to the suffix, although the vowel is
necessary nonetheless to avoid an invalid syllable shape. It
must also be noted that transitive had *e-vocalism in the
verb stem while intransitives had *a-vocalism.


Stage 2: transitive => objective
intransitive => subjective trans/subjective intrans

So the first shift is a transition from a language that
is concerned with the presence or absence of an object with a
verb to a language that elaborates on whether the object is
definite or indefinite/absent. This would be precisely when
*-e was attached to the subjective. Think about it for a
second. If the transitive should become the objective, there
is no dilemma because an objective focuses on the object and
the transitive always has an object. The objective verb implies
transitivity. However, a subjective verb may or may not be
transitive. So the subjective transitive was derived from the
former intransitive. In the 1ps we obtain *-ah-e (with *-e
being nothing more than the 3p oblique of *ei).

Still don't get it? Well, look at this example, you stubborn man,
and stop thinking about the next jab to type:

1. */bara/ 'He carried' (intr)

2a. **/bara kewanata/ 'He carried (intr), a dog (partitive)'
Sentence is disjointed between an intransitive
verb and an unexpected indefinite object.

2b. */bar(a)-e kewanata/ 'He carried (tr) a dog'
By adding the the oblique *e at the end, the verb
phrase now announces the presence of an object that
is naturally marked in the partitive when it follows.
As a result we have an indefinite object with topical
focus placed on the subject without disjointedness
of these intertwined verb and noun phrases. And
statives of course are intransitive and thus subjective
so they are marked simply by *-ah in the 1ps.


Stage 3: objective => imperfect active / imperfect stative
subjective => perfect active / perfect stative

An extra dimension of active/stative developped cleaving the
original subjective/objective contrast into a box of four cells.
Subjectivity also shifted in semantics such that a focus on
the definiteness of an object translated into the definiteness of
the verb, or rather the verb's single or abrupt event. Object
indefiniteness consequently was easily handled by case marking
alone anyway (through the means of either animate accusative *-m,
although unmarked for inanimates, or the partitive in *-ata).

More recognizable names for the four categories mentioned above
are durative (imperfect active), aorist (imperfect stative),
perfect (perfect active) and stative (perfect stative). Both
the durative and aorist had their slightly different *m-sets
while the perfect and statives had their slightly different
*x-sets.

I suppose that had the stative continued on into IE, we could
easily get this four-way system to collapse into the mi- and
hi-classes in Anatolian while also collapsing into a 3-way
durative-aorist-perfect system in the rest of IE by simply
merging the perfect and stative together.


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

In a nutshell: Changes in word order. Seperate evolutions of Nostratic's
ergative and largely analytic natures in the diverging Nostratic
language groups must be recognized and finally detailed in more depth
than has been done up to now.

In AfroAsiatic, the absolutive forms of the pronouns were prefixed
to form the stative conjugation. This is easy to understand considering
that verbs with absolutive subjects are intransitive and intransitives
can evolve into statives because statives are, well, intransitive anyway.
Kartvelian used the absolutive and ergative contrast to mark the
transitivity of the verb naturally, again through the use of prefixing.
This would suggest a primarly SVO or SOV word order in Nostratic.

The other languages are a seperate group. Sumerian first of all
split away. By the time Elamite had split away from Proto-Eurasiatic
as it headed towards Central Asia, both ergative and absolute pronouns
were _suffixed_ to the verb stem to mark transitivity. It was probably
at this point that ergativity shifted towards accusativity as well.
Dravidian diverged next and opted to generalize the nominative form of
pronouns (formerly absolutive) while discarding the oblique ones
(formerly ergative). The Proto-Steppe language that arrived to Central
Asia by about 9,000 BCE however chose to discard the absolutive set of
pronouns while generalizing the oblique forms to the nominative, hence
Proto-Steppe *mu and *tu versus Dravidian *ya:n (< *u-n) and *ni:n (<
*nu-n). Proto-Steppe also kept the intransitive-transitive conjugation
system intact (transitive *-im/*-it/*-i vs intransitive *-uh/*-un/*-u).
This latter system is the basis on which I further explain the origins
of IE's system.

Those are the in-betweens.


= gLeN