Me:
>> Just a mere hypothesis...
>>
>> Doesn't *es- "to be" include the same *-s- that is the suffix
found in sigmatic aorist and future? Than the primary root *e- can
be compared with a plenty of similar Nostratic forms, e.g. Turkic e-
(e-di/ e-r-di "was" etc.), Mongolic a- (a-mui "is" etc.), Finno-
Ugric *e-/*o- (Komi e-m "there is", Fin. o-n < *o-m "is").
>>
>> Since the function of *-s- in IE sigmatic aorist and future seems
to transform continuative/iterative verbal stems into
momentative/inchoative ones, we may suppose that the primary copula
*e- "to be", when used with the *-s-, had to mean "to become", but
afterwards the former could disappeare, and than the latter began to
be used instead of it...
>>
>> This, of course, can explain, why in many IE branches (the most of
them!) *es- has no future or/and aorist forms, using instead
something like *bhu:-, primarily meaning "to grow". Cf. Rus. budu,
Lith. busiu "I shall be", Pers. budam, Lat. fui "I was" etc. -
everywhere present forms being from *es-. And even if the future and
aorist forms of the root *es- do exist, they tend to be not
sigmatic. This we see, for example, in Latin, where the future ero:
< *eso: is thematic vs. athematic present, and in Greek, where the
future esomai is thematic and middle vs. athematic and active
present.
>>
>> Any objections?
Jens:
>Yes, some. The aorist *-s- and the future *-H1s- are not identical
with each other. The latter may be formally identical with the root
*H1es- 'be', but what would it mean? Conceivably, *mén-&1s-o: 'I
shall think' could mean properly "a thinker - I shall be", supposing
a root-noun *men- to mean 'thinker'. But by what logic would a
reduplicated form of the presumed root-noun followed by the same
thematic form of the verb (with regularly reduced vocalism), i.e. a
collocation *mí-mn.-H1s-o:, have come to mean 'I wish to think'? I
do not see how this adds up in any sensible and insightful way.
Therefore my guess will be that it is not correct.
Well, I did not mean that the future and aorist markers could develop from
the root *es-. I ment something just different: that *es- historicaly was a
suffixed form, i.e. including the *-s- marker of future/aorist. So my
hypothesis does not demand the semantic and morphological interpretations
like "a thinker - I shall be" for *mén-&1s-o: etc.
But I do not understand why you consider that the suffixation in aorist and
future is different. What is the reason to reconstruct *-H1s- in the future?
Exu Yangi:
>Well, *e- isn't much of an IE or PIE form. *H1es- works. We are pretty sure
>that the laryngeal was there, so you need to figure out how to get H1e-
>shoehorned into some kind pf PIE form. The problem, of course, being it
just
>doesn't look like a PIE root.
>
>So, you need to get something like *H1eCs- -> *H1es-, where C is some
>consonant. Of course some folks do reconstruct *H1s-, but that makes the
>situation worse, not better.
If I understand you correctly, the idea is that PIE roots structure must
always be CVC... Well, it is so for meaningful words, but the primary
copula, I think, can be CV as some other "grammatical" words do, e.g.
pronouns. *H1e-s- is not worse than *e-s- for my hypothesis, is it? And
typologically, an exact parallel is found, for example, in Proto-Uralic,
where the both copulas *o-/*e- and *le:- are monosyllabic, and pronominal
roots too, but meaningful words root structure always is CV(C)CV.
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Vadim Ponaryadov