Re: [tied] Re: Various loose thoughts

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:50:05 +0000, pielewe
<wrvermeer@...> wrote:

>> I see it as a return to etymology. I have only a limited
>> grasp of the laws of accentuation concerning suffixes in
>> PIE, but it seems to me that in PIE the situation was very
>> different from that of BS (according to the MAS model).
>
>
>As far as I know, the MAS people have not been very eloquent about
>the PIE background of their rule(s), apart from claiming that there
>is one (a PIE background, I mean).
>
>
>On the Leiden side there is Sasha Lubotsky's doctoral dissertation on
>Vedic, which I'm not in a position to evaluate, and also one or two
>arguments by Kortlandt that are always laconic in the extreme and
>unlikely to draw large crowds, perhaps most recently his "Indo-Uralic
>consonant gradation", in: Etymologie, Entlehnungen und Entwicklungen
>(Festschrift for Koivulehto), Helsinki, 2004.

I have today tried again, unsuccessfully, to understand the
chapter "Udarenie derivatov v drevneindijskom i
drevengrec^eskom", in Dybo, Zamjatina, Nikolaev, OSA --
Slovar' I, 1993. I was surprised to read there that *sed-
"sit" is a seT root, which kind of undermined my confidence
in the further course of the argument. And I don't get the
connection with Balto-Slavic.

>[...]
>
>
>> Without this etymological/PIE background, the terms
>> "dominant" and "recessive" suffix are unmotivated labels.
>> They do the job, but we know nothing about their genesis.
>
>
>I think that is too strong. In the MAS view it is held to represent a
>reflex of a system in which every morpheme had an inherent tone (high
>or low or something along those lines), which then at some
>[unspecified, Ed.] stage degenerated into a stress system, with every
>left-most high now becoming the stressed syllable and the rest is
>history.
>
>
>Lubotsky's doctoral dissertation is intended to investigate some
>details of the background of those tones against the background of
>Vedic facts (but as I said earlier, I'm not in a position to judge
>whether it cuts any ice).
>
>
>The words "dominant" and "recessive" definitely are not intended as
>mere descriptive devices and don't function as such in the world view
>of those operating and living with them. Despite the fact that they
>[the labels] have at times been used in ways that need the urgent
>attention of the methodology police, notably in the Nikolaev sections
>of the MAS corpus.

In my experience, when I started thinking of "dominant" and
"recessive" in terms of "PIE stressed" and "PIE unstressed",
it all began to make much more sense.

This is particularly clear in the cases of *-ikós (-IcI,
-Ice, -Ica), *-ijós (-IjI, -Ije, -Ija) [usually oxytone in
Vedic] and also enlightening in the case of the infinitive
suffix *-té(:)i [the suffix -tí- is usually oxytone in
Vedic], vs. the supine suffix *'-tum [always barytone in
Vedic].


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