Peter P:
> I just wanted to comment on Finnish and Estonian participles. They
> are not necessarily as simple as participles in English.
Yes, which is partly what I'm trying to say. This is a matter of
semantics really. I'm questioning whether it is correct to call them
'participle' endings. I think it's confusing and makes it seem that
these markers somehow make a verb something else. As far as I see, those
endings do NOT make them non-verbs in itself. So if that is true, that
endings like Uralic *-pa and *-ya are used in BOTH verbs AND nouns, then
it's less confusing to associate them with the obvious and call them
what they are. If they act more like IE's _modal_ endings, such as infix
*-n- and aorist *-s-, then that's how we should regard them. So *-ya
may mark the past but it only affects tense, not word category.
Let's look at it this way. You have a word like, say, *tumta-ya and
it constitutes a phrase by itself. Is it a noun, a verb or an adjective?
Well it may not matter because 'he knew' and 'he (was) that-which-knew'
is semantically equivalent anyways. Get it now? So, in a sentence with
an explicit pronoun and an object of the action, it would be fairly clear
that *tumtaya is a **VERB** in that sentence, but this doesn't prevent
it from being a noun either and declined with case endings. Get it now??
So if that's true, then does that mean that *tumtaya was originally
a noun only? No. It's probably the case that such a word originates from
two different sources, one noun, the other verb -- A merger of two word
forms in two different word categories. In this case, one could imagine
former noun stem marked with *-i, *tumta-i, making **tumta-y-a for the
3p singular in *-a. Since *tumtai becomes *tumtaya to obey new phonotactic
rules that disallowed most consonant ending nouns, the 3ps becomes
identical to the noun stem. Thus, we explain the Uralic situation.
The scenario that I've described is completely parallel with what I find
in IndoTyrrhenian, IE's ancestor, where a single fragile vowel *-e marks
the 3ps while action nouns can be bare. Tyrrhenian *-e is found in
Etruscan (am-a, car-a, tur-a, etc) and is clearly the state of affairs
before the agglutination of deictic *ta to the old 3ps in *-e (MIE *-e-ta
> *-et) in IndoEuropean.
= gLeN