--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
>
> I borrowed another book at the library (oh no!). This time on
> Hittite.
>
> How come *s- and t- of *so- and *to- are considered to be
> demonstrative stems, when they are also connectives? Wouldn't it be
> more economical to see them as only connectives?
>
> The fused morphs that originate in Wackernagel's position migrate
to
> other places with other meanings, but someone forgot to take them
> apart again, thus *tom > Latin tum "then", but *tom > Germanic *Tan-
> "him" (acc.)
>
Dutch has three deictic ("locativic") pronouns:
'hier' and 'daar', which mean what one would expect them to mean,
and 'er', which is sort of a generalized "there is somewhere"; used
i.a. in formal passives representing impersonal statements:
'er word gepraat' = "there is talk, people talk"
similarly Danish:
'der snakkes'
Odd thing is, medio-passives in other IE languages (Italic, Celtic,
Tocharian, Hittite) use the same *(t)er as a suffix in medio-passive
standing for impersonal statements.
Which makes on wonder whether, as everyone seems to assume, the
various verbal suffixes developped after the verb first, or whether
they were moved there from elsewhere in the sentence? *-t-er is a
compound morph already (sentence connective -t, "locativic(?)" -er)
Torsten