Re: [tied] Re: -i, -u

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 08:55:49 -0700 (PDT),
enlil@... wrote:

>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

It makes it a present participle. What more evidence do you
want?

>, yet this is not always the case... based on the very same language
>we're talking about.
>
>Pronominal endings

Those are possessive endings, so it makes a lot of sense
that they be tacked unto a nominal form of the verb.

>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.

No idea what you're talking about.

>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

Calling *-i "indicative" is insufficient evidence that it's
a modal suffix, which it isn't.

>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.
>
>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".

I don't think Bomhard writes anything about third person
markers (or lack of) in that book. You must be referring to
Kerns' rather useless chapter on grammar.

I was talking about Finnic. You claimed that the 3rd.
person form "had become" endingless, but *-(s/z)en is not
lost in Finnic, it is clearly still there in the passive,
imperative, etc. The form was endingless to begin with. It
doesn't matter what it was in Proto-Uralic.

If you want to know, the situation in Proto-Uralic was
probably that transitive verbs were made by adding the
possessive endings sg. *-m&, *-t&/*-d& *-sa/*-za; du.
*-min', *-tin'/*-din', *-sin'/*-zin'; pl. *-m&t,
*-t&t/*-d&t, *-s&n/*-z&n to a verbal noun (or participle),
agreeing in number (sg., du., pl.) with the object.
Intransitive verbs had special endings (*-k, *-n, *-0; pl.
*-t-m&k, *-t-t&k, *-t). The zero ending of the Finic 3rd.
person sg. has been generalized from the intransitive forms
(likewise the 1 and 2pl. forms *-mm&k > -mme, *-tt&k >
-tte). The present/durative tense is obviously built on the
present participle *-pV, as it also is in Lapp (partially,
some forms are built on a different participle/verbal noun
in *-ja) and Samoyed.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...