Jens:
> Sounds frustrating when a complete recast is called for.
Even more frustrating when learning and advancement is discouraged
by those cantankerous individuals that hold on to the same beliefs
for years on end.
> Words like *méne 'of me', *téwe 'of thee', *pénkWe 'five' would not
> have three consonants even without their final vowels;
No. So what? It makes no difference because I'm the one that accepts
a two-vowel system. MIE *-a disappears after Syncope but *-e doesn't.
MIE *-e remains eLIE *-a [&] which becomes *-e in final position anyway,
as we find with bare thematic stems in the vocative.
> *nókWt-s 'night' and participles in *-ont-s have three final consonants
> despite the anti-clipping pseudorule;
1. The origin of *nokWt- is transparent, being a stative of a verb
stem *nekW-. The original meaning was "darkness, dusk, evening".
The absence of Szemerenyi Lengthening and simple etymology shows
us that the word postdates Syncope.
2. Participial *-ont- is a composite suffix consisting of *-on- and
*-t-. It's dated to the Late IE period as are most other composite
suffixes. It too has no Szemerenyi Lengthening and so can't date to
that time period.
3. S-aorists like *de:ikst are denominal in origin. They show
Szemerenyi Lengthening and do indeed date to Syncope but only as noun
stems. Before the sigmatic aorist developped it's likely that root
aorists were used.
4. Feminines like *gWén-ex have no bearing to Anatolian-inclusive IE
which is known to have distinguished two genders: animate and
inanimate. No feminine. Even so, accusative *gWenxm is CVCCV!
5. Sorry, *?nóhW-mn and *g^énH1-mn end in vowels too. What the hell are
you getting at here?!
> Your socalled "a-Epenthesis" is nothing but a stolen object.
If information cannot be taken from other sources without being called
stolen, we all may as well give up studying anything in fear.
> It is true that some nominal stems which show -o(:)- in their strong
> forms have -e- in their weak cases. However, the collateral type with
> strong-case -e:- which is parallelled by the verb shows, in my opinion,
> that the underlying vowel is a long /-e:-/ for both alternants.
Yes, "in your opinion" (aka "my idle assumption"). There is no *e: in
either forms so you have to dream it up in order to get your results.
What I do is _accept_ that *o and *e are both there and that one of them
is original. Picking the nominative form with *o as original is the only
sensible choice. However, we can see that *o < *a (via Vowel Shift),
otherwise many things aren't as phonetically motivated such as
a-Epenthesis and the thematic vowel alternations.
As for these examples not showing *i-vocalism, there's an obvious
reason for it. My views on syllabification reflect the known morphology
of these words such that the syllable boundary is placed at the same place
as the union of stem and desinence. So *pedos = /ped.'os/ and *pedi
/ped.'i/. Since monosyllabic nominal stems are always CVC, we can never
expect *i reflected here because we will never have an open syllable.
> The lexical accent is unaffected by the shape of the flexive and only
> concerns the stem, but the mobility of the inflexive accent is caused by
> the attraction exerted by an underlyingly syllabic flexive.
The previous post demonstrates that you're incorrect and you fail to
explain the entire proterodynamic paradigm as well as purposely ignore
sensible etymologies to these asyllabic desinences that anyone else
can see are of demonstrative origin.
> This will be modified (further down) by the possible acceptance of
> subphonemic mini-vowels
This can't work for IE. Sorry. You may get away with it in EA or
Uralic, if that indeed is what you mean to convey when you weave
a silly long string of morphemes together without any vowels in
between.
> Also *ud-n-ós would come out of **wed-n-ós with shift of the accent
> from the root to the ending due to its vowel. And *wéd-n-s would come
> out of **we:d-n-ós if that was the old form.
This comes out of that, if this, but not that... yadayada. This should
not be a difficult word to understand. It is clearly old having the
heteroclitic alternation. It always had accent on the genitive because
it conforms with QAR. There's no need to drum up pretend forms. The
only form that is acceptable in the above besides *udnós is *wednós
which shouldn't even be double-asterisked considering that that alternate
form is reflected in Hittite. I don't understand your reasoning here, if
we can even call it that.
Where on earth is the reflex of **wedns? Why isn't _this_ double-
asterisked?
> Rather than have the pronoun form *so produce a nominative you now let
> it mark a genitive, and of all genders.
It would be nice if before you reject, that you understand what you're
rejecting. I've said clearly multiple times that a particle *sa marked
the IndoTyrrhenian _animate nominative_. It didn't in any way mark the
inanimate, which was bear. Obviously so since we don't find inanimates
marked with *-s in IE itself, do we. Where do you dream this stuff up?
The genitive is NOT marked and NEVER WAS marked with the same particle
as the nominative. I had said that the IndoTyrrhenian genitive was a
_suffix_ *-ase that ultimately derived from the Proto-Steppe ablative
particle *si. This is to be distinguished from *sa, the Proto-Steppe
general demonstrative that the ancestor of Uralic and EA have been
shown to have used as a 3ps marker.
Pay attention.
> In the old days a vowel was inserted you say, and later speakers could
> handle the form without,
?? I can't be bothered to repeat myself and correct you when you don't
even pay attention. You can reread the post you're blindly responding to
and paraphrase properly next time. A vowel was inserted in IndoTyrrhenian
to seperate a consonant-ending stem from a consonant-beginning suffix.
> A desinence that fails to attract accent may be a desinence without
> any vowel to do it with. That is simpler by any standard,
Any standard except phonotactics, etymology, morphology, accentuation,
etc. Syllable shape is the most basic part of a reconstruction so if we
go willy-nilly on that, we really end up with a chaotic result. You
lack a standard by simply stringing consonants in an absurd chain in
every language you deal with and then say that the vowels are "sub-
phonemic". Any sensible etymologies for these desinences which strongly
appear to be mostly garden-variety demonstratives is dismissed by you
as invalid. What rot.
> Elaborate please. But sure, most others don't know a first thing about
> these matters. Where are the vowels you cling to, and what proves their
> antiquity? For EA, I wrote the only book that exists on the subject.
> What *are* you talking about? There are plenty of anaptyctic vowels of
> a subphonemic status,[...]
Alright, I guess my philosophy is that if someone is reconstructing
a language, they do it by reflecting the phonology. If there are vowels
there, I should see them in the reconstruction, even if they are
"subphonemic". Also, while I suppose it could be possible that they
are subphonemic in EA (although I'm skeptical), I really don't see that
being the original state of affairs. In Uralic, we still don't have
subphonemic vowels like you say. It can be understood as having a
simple CV(C) pattern without problems. Your theory only complicates things
unnecessarily.
> The inflectional accent actually reveals that. In addition, it should
> not be just assumed without proper reason that all IE consonants were
> once followed by vowels. We have good reason to believe that an optative
> form like *dwis-iH1-ént had some such shape as *dweys-yeH1-ént before
> the ablaut produced zero-grade of two of its elements; it is quite
> another matter when some analysts run amok and posit some such thing as
> *deweyese-yeH1e-énete.
No. If you're talking about MIE, the form would be expected to be
**t:waisa-yah-éna-ta. Of course I don't feel that the optative is
anything but a recent conjugation anyways. The optative looks suspiciously
like an extension of a verb stem marked with *-ye-.
> There is no ablaut difference between present and aorist in IE.
Precisely. So why should there be a difference in thematic vowel? That's
simply because the thematic vowel for the durative was *-e- and survived
Syncope while the aorist had the thematic vowel *-a- which didn't. The
root aorist may work fine without the extra *-a-... but it still doesn't
explain the differences with thematic vowel. The thematic vowel is just
not a morpheme by any standards no matter how much we squint so this is
the simplest solution possible and Syncope takes care of the rest.
On EA, Jens:
> Well, Eskimo and Aleut did in fact use fillers with some consonants,
> and after clusters. But that was a nonphonemic vowel,
Alright, thanks for the clarification. When you string consonants together
without vowels I naturally assume you aren't reconstructing vowels which
looks completely absurd and unpronounceable.
> *aluR > PE *aluq 'footsole' (WGr. /aluq/, Chapl. aluq)
> *aluR-m > PE *allum (WGr. allup, Chapl. alum)
> *aluR-d > PE *allut (WGr. allut, Chapl. alut).
Hmm, but I think I see a pattern. Why wouldn't it be...
*aluR *nat¤R *cavig
*alRu-m *natR¤-m *cavig¤-m
*alRu-d *natR¤-d *cavig¤-d
> I also find anaptyxis obvious for a Finnish example like:
But what does Finnish have to do with Uralic and ultimately with
older stages when there is so much time gap?
On the vowel of the Proto-Steppe plural that I reconstruct as *-it:
> In my estimate it is phonemically zero. Even in later periods it
> has not merged with any of the independent vowels.
It wouldn't. The *i disappears before vowel-ending stems because there
can only be one vowel per syllable.
> There is the complication that the IE form is a nominative plural, not
> just a plural.
Yes! It was! Well, more specifically, the plural was marked in the
nominative and accusative, the strong cases but not the weak ones. This
has been my position for a while now. It is shown by the fact that the
plural is wonky in IE weak cases while very much standard and more
expected in form in the nominative and accusative. Afterall, if the
genitive had *-os in the singular, we should expect plural **-oses right?
No, for the clear reason that the plural was only marked in the nominative
and accusative in earlier stages... and only in the _animate_ gender,
mind you.
This makes sense given that the subject and the object, the foci of
these cases, are the main characters in the sentence. Their plurality
then will tend to be of more topic interest then the number of an
indirect object.
= gLeN