Me:
> My point is that endings like *-pa and *-ya aren't "participle"
> endings to begin with in Uralic.
Miguel:
> And this "point" is based on what?
I mean to say that you're trying to make it seem that because *-pa is
tacked onto a verb stem that it somehow makes it something other than a
verb, yet this is not always the case... based on the very same language
we're talking about.
Pronominal endings can follow *-pa, or whatever other extension, so it's
clear that it in itself does not make a verb something else. That's not
its primary function. So you _claim_ that a noun with possessive
endings became a verb or something to that effect but it's unnecessary
conjecture.
Like I said, these endings are parallel and related to the extensions
we see in IE. I betcha that the *-pa ending is derived from a verb stem
like *pu- from ProtoSteppe *bu, which is where IE *bHeu- "to become"
would derive from. Starting out as an inchoative marker, it would be
natural for it to later be used for the present tense.
Me:
>They are modal endings
Miguel:
> They occur in the indicative, so there's nothing "modal"
> about them.
Of course and unless I missed something, Uralic appears to be a language
more focused on tense than mood but I doubt that this was the original
state. When you unravel Pre-IE, you notice that tense doesn't play a
central role in conjugation there either, since both the indicative *-i
that marks the "present" and the *e- extension marking the past are
part of the most recent layer of IE by far, transparently derived from
demonstrative stems.
Me:
> At best, the action noun and an endingless 3ps, both with seperate
> origins, had merged. I see little distinguishing an action noun
> from the 3ps aorist in Mid IE except for *-a.
Miguel:
> What are you talking about? Action nouns in *-tó-?
No, those words made into nouns by taking the bare verb stem and adding
the animate nominative *-sa to them, if at all. It would be a contrast
of *béu-a, an aorist verb in the 3ps, and *béu-sa, a root noun. Not
much difference without *-sa. In Proto-Steppe, I would imagine that
a bare verb stem like *gur "to heat", or even when augmented with a
detransitive marker to form *gurit, could be used as a noun without
further marking. However, it could also be a verb when followed by
pronominal endings as in a case of 3ps intransitive *gurit-u. The
difference between the root noun and the 3ps is simply a single vowel
and given the phonotactics of Uralic, these two forms would inevitably
merge unless action was taken to disambiguate them.
Miguel:
> The 3rd. person pronominal marker is absent from the preterite, the
> present and the conditional. [...] The present and the preterite didn't
> have *-sa / *-sen in Finnic. [<==== Finnic?!!!]
Has this been shown for **Proto-Uralic** itself? And if so, please tell
Allan Bomhard about it whom I remember cites quite a different theory
about the function of the peekaboo third person in "Indo-European and the
Nostratic Hypothesis".
= gLeN