--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 09:39:03 +0000, tgpedersen
> <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> >--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "petegray" <petegray@...> wrote:
> >> > 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.
> >>
> >> Latin uses -tur < *-to-r, not -ter.
> >>
> >
> >I should have written *-te/or. Tocharian has -tär and -tar.
>
> Both from *-tor. (*-ter would have given *-cär).
>
Hm. At least Dutch 'daar', Engl. 'there' shows it must have been
*te/or.
Sturtevant discusses Hittite heteroclitic nouns in -tar, -tan- which
are action nouns. He equates the oblique stem -tan- with the Latin
gerund in -nd- (by metathesis as in *udna > unda). That fits nicely
the fact that the gerund, being syntactically the inflected
infinitive, does not exist in the nominative. Now, the question is:
what happened in Latin to the nominative -tar of the action noun?n
Answer: it became the agent noun suffix -(t)or.
Another point. The m/w alternation (< *mW ?) in the 1pl. suffix
reappears in the *-men(t)-/*-wen(t)- suffix and nowhere else I've
heard of (*-mer/*-wer ?). That would point to a common
origin "outside the verb", and, considering its rarity in IE, to a
loan (as a word, not morpheme) from elsewhere. As for the origin, I
still think a merger of Ruhlen's two *m-n- Proto-World words (which I
think are wanderwords), one for "mind, think, man", one for "remain",
would be a good candidate, especially since a *m/*w alternation (ie.
a common origin from something like *mW-) would make them cognate
with two *w-n- roots Bomhard has for Nostratic (I don't have the
book; my memory retains that one was cognate with PIE *wen- (Venus
etc) "love; friendly", the other with German 'wohnen' "inhabit").
Thus from a wanderword *mW-n- standing for the newly invented idea
of "soul; the part of a person which isn't his body, but remains
after death".
Torsten