From: tgpedersen
Message: 36639
Date: 2005-03-04
>How about impersonal *-er -> 3.pl. *-er-s (cf Russian use of 3 pl.
> >
> > I haven't made my mind up where it comes from. The first
> > thought is to connect it to the Uralic possessive and verbal
> > definite endings *-m&, *-t&, *-sa, which are quite plainly
> > agglutinated personal pronouns. I don't think there can be
> > any doubt that the PIE endings *-m, *-s have the same
> > source, even if the exact course of events can be disputed
> > (my view is that *-m and *-s [in fact *-mW and *-sW] reflect
> > agglutinated *mu and *tu, where the second is the PIE 2nd.
> > person pronoun, the first the basis for the oblique of the
> > 1st. person pronoun [but the nom. has been replaced by
> > *h1eg^]).
> >
> > If we have *m(w)e and *twe, then *swe, the 3rd. person
> > reflexive, can reflect the development of a former 3rd.
> > person pronoun *su. Its agglutination would lead directly
> > to a 3rd. person marker *-s (*-sW). Note, however, that the
> > Uralic and PIE forms cannot have a shared origin as
> > _endings_: the 3 plural is *-sa-n in Uralic, it is *-en >
> > *-er + *-s = *-ers (> *-r.s, *-é:r) in PIE. The order of
> > the elements is inverted, and the *-s can only have been
> > agglutinated in IE _after_ final *-n became *-r.
> > The other option is that *-s is the agglutinated nominativeHow is that different from your proposed 3rd sg. pronoun *su ?
> > of the demonstrative pronoun *so.
>How come 1st and 2nd pl. are so complicated that they are always
> If the primary endings -m, -s, -t, -nt are not originally the
> personal endings of a finite verb in a dependent clause, but the
> possessive endings of a participle/gerund in a dependent
> construction, then they should have a case ending of some kind to
> mark their role in the main sentence, cf Finnish and other FU
> languages.