On 05-03-21 05:17, Gordon Barlow wrote:
> English -ish derives from *-iskos.
> (Richard)
> <-ish> is from PGmc. *-iska-.
> (Brian)
>
> Fair enough, and thank you. But what was the origin - or at least the PIE
> version - of *iska or *iskos? Second question is, please, what happened to
> the *wo of PIE, or *wos, as a colours-suffix? Is it represented in modern
> English?
The protoform was *-isko-. The suffix is so complex phonologically that
it must have developed from the coalescence of shorter morphemes; by
PGmc. times, however, it was not analysable into smaller parts. As
Richard has pointed out, the final *-s in *-isko-s is not part of the
suffix but a separate morpheme -- the nom.sg. ending of masculine nouns
and adjectives (cf. feminine *-iskah2 and neuter *-iskom; other
grammatical cases of course had their own endings). In Proto-Germanic,
*-iskos became *-iskaz via regular sound changes; it is reflected as
Gothic -isks, Old English -isc (= Modern Eng. -ish), Old Norse -iskr.
There was no "colour suffix" *-wo-, although such a sequence of segments
(Of various origin) appears at the end of some IE stems. Eng. grey, ON
grár and OHG gra:o are usually derived from *g^Hreh1-w-(j)o-, which
looks like an extension of an earlier stem in *-u-.
Piotr