> Now, if the verbal noun involved is an agent noun rather than an
> action noun, the marker *-i of the primary endings cannot well be
a
> locative: A killer who is active now is not "in a killer", he just
is
> a killer, and he is it 'now' or 'here'. There is no basic
grammatical
> difference in IE between place and time: Ved. dyávi 'in the sky',
> dyávi-dyavi 'in each day, day by day'. The form *-i is in my
analysis
> simply the stem of the pronoun whose stem is either *e-/*o- or
*H1e-
> /**H1o-. The enclitic form of this would be *i or *H1i, cf
enclitic
> *im 'him', *id 'it' in a number of languages. Thus the *-i (or *-
H1i)
> may be itself just an endingless locative meaning 'in it, there'.
>
I am much impressed, but not quite convinced. One advantage of
seeing the supposed finite verb (with active endings) is that it
will explain why *-os is both nominative and genitive and *-om is
both accusative and genitive; thus: the PIE sentence with an active
verb is actually a verbal noun with two genitives (or a genitive and
a partitive?). Therefore *-os, the 'subjective genitive' marker,
becomes a nominative marker, and *-om, the 'objective genitive' or
partitive marker, becomes an accusative marker when the verbal noun
is reinterpreted as a finite verb.
In order to get there, we must see -t as a verbal noun marker (the
road between adjectival forms of verbs and verbal nouns is short).
That should take care of the *-gWHen "-killer" argument (since now
agent nouns have -Ø, action nouns -t).
-m and -s are then either portmanteau morphemes with the double
meaning "my V-ing", "thy V-ing" respectively, or were once -t-m and
-t-s, respectively.
Torsten