Re: Thematic vowel etc

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 10:49:41 +0000, tgpedersen
> <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> >> >Of all the things that were inflected like nouns in the
> >beginning,
> >> >the demonstratives were the only ones that were not syllabic.
> >>
> >> Why do you say that? I've never seen an asyllabic
> >> demonstrative.
> >
> >I've reassigned *t-, *s-, *y- of the demonstratives to be

sentence

> >connectives, as they are in Hittite.
>
> You mean ta, su, -(y)a "and"? What about nu, -ma?

They're included, but I didn't need them in this argument, so I
didn't mention them.

>
> >The result of that is that
> >demonstratives consist of *s-, *t-, *y-, which are non-syllabic,
> >plus suffix. Inevitably the result of that composition must be
> >stressed on the suffix.
>
> My question still stands: where have you ever seen an
> asyllabic demonstrative? If the demonstrative is weakened
> to a definite article, it may occasionally become assylabic,
> but not if it remains as a demonstrative. Case in point is
> Slavic tU, which should have become asyllabic after the loss
> of the yers, but didn't (Russ. tot, Pol. ten, etc.).
>

But we're talking about two different things.
As you probably know, Sturtevant thinks of the IE demonstratives as
composed of sentence connective + enclitic pronoun (*so- + *-os ->
*sos, *to- + *-om -> *tom etc). Now suppose those enclitic pronouns
were also the source of case endings (noun + *-os, noun + *-om etc).
In that case it might make sense with a rule that reduced the
unstressed /o*/ of the case endings to /&/, and later to zero (noun
+ -&s, noun + -&m), but *sos, *tom etc could never become +s&m,
+t&m, since there's no way the /o/ could escape the stress.

Torsten