Re: [tied] Re: Thematic vowel etc

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 09:58:23 +0000, tgpedersen
<tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>> 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).

I didn't know that, but it strikes me as an utterly
unhelpful proposal.

>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.

Only the case endings of the o-stems can be explained as
deriving from thematic vowel + enclitic pronoun (*-os, *-om,
*-osyo, etc.). For all the other nominal declensions, there
is absolutely no reason to think so (just look at the
genitive).

At no point is an asyllabic demonstrative to be
reconstructed.

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