From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 35967
Date: 2005-01-16
>From: "Sergejus Tarasovas" <s.tarasovas@...>Not me. But is the loss of -s in Dpl. and Ipl. regular?
>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Mate Kapovic" <mkapovic@...> wrote:
>>
>>> Hm, but the fact is that only -u- does *not* disappear from the
>> last
>>> syllable in Latvian. Cf. in o-stems Lith. -as : Latv. -s and in u-
>> stems
>>> Lith. -us : Latv. -us. Also, *-u is preserved in Auslaut as well in
>> Latvian.
>>> Thus, it couldn't have been *-mus in pre-Latvian.
>>
>>
>> By that logic, modern Standard Lith. -ms can continue anything but *-
>> mus, since -u- otherwise does *not* disappear from the last syllable
>> in Lithuanian. One should not forget we are speaking of a
>> *disyllabic* desinence, which well may have developed by slightly
>> different (morpho)phonological rules.
>>
>> I'm not an expert in Latvian historical phonology, but I think
>> Endzeli:ns had his reasons to not exclude *-mus.
>
>I still think you cannot compare (Modern) Lithuanian developments with
>pre-Latvian ones. Do you have any example of the cases of unregular
>behaviour of vowels in the last syllable in Latvian?
>In Latvian, the rule isBut *-mas > -mus in Lith. may be simple, it's not regular.
>simple, short vowels are dropped in the last syllable, except *-u-. When we
>see that in Lith. -mus yield -ms and maybe earlier *-mas yielded -mus, we
>have to assume a special development. But in case of Latvian, we do not. Of
>course, there is always a possibity of it I think that we have stick with
>the simplest and regular development if we have no strong proof pointing
>otherwise.