tgpedersen wrote:
> You must think I'm an idiot. Of course I know that, like everyone
> else.
In that case I fail to see what your problem is.
> All Jens had to say was that the semi-thematic paradigm is rare.
> Schmalstieg quotes Meillet as saying that comparative grammar should
> use anomalies, ie. survivals, rather than regular forms. I second
> that.
That can hardly be extended to an anomaly unsupported by data from other
IE languages, and one for which a simple and plausible language-specific
explanation is available. Otherwise you would have to insist that
irregularities like go/went and person/people must be survivals. The
curious alternation of *e/*o in the thematic paradigm is a peculiarity
shared by several branches and so unlikely to have developed
independently. The semithematic pattern, on the other hand, is a local
oddity best explained as a local innovation. What generalisation would
have produced *bHer-e-t/*bHer-o-nt out of **bHer-t/**bHr-o-nt? To ask
the most obvious questions, why is the "generalised" thematic vowel *e
in the allegedly innovated forms if the only models for its insertion
had **-o-? Why does the *e/*o alternation (certainly a non-trivial
correspondence) recur in branch after branch, if it's post-PIE?
Piotr