--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
wrote:
[JER:]
> > So all in all, one
> > will only ascribe pre-PIE age to the structure of sum if one has
> to.
> > And one doesn't have to.
> >
>
> Will one that? One is from Sjælland, I gather? ;-).
Things I have said in scholarly debates have been confronted with
many subtle arguments over the years. This one escapes me. Are you
saying there is a hierarchy of birthplaces that qualify scholars to
different degrees? Then you can render a great service to humanity
by telling us which birthplace is highest on the list so that we can
just ask those few that come from there what we want to know.
Perhaps, however, before we get that far you would do well also to
tell those of us that are less fortunate in this respect why we have
to believe there is such a hierarchy.
> This one will do
> it anyway and see where the ride takes him.
I think that path has been ridden upon many times. I did not find
salvation at the end of the line, but let's have another look.
> As for the presence of
> 1 sg./pl. *-sm- in pre-PIE, that is only to be expected since that
> is the outcome of regularising the *h1s- paradigm. It does not
> preclude the existence of 1 sg./pl. *som- .
That regularising process has then changed a number of presumed
thematic forms to athematic forms. All other regularization goes the
other way. Except for Anatolian which obviously developed a problem
with the "simple thematic" structure all IE languages show a massive
drift of athematic structures into thematic conjugations. So massive
in fact that the process must have begun before the disintegration
of the protolanguage. Are we now to believe that, after the breakup
of PIE, inherited thematic forms of the 1sg, 1pl and 3pl were
*normalized* away from the ongoing trend which was to thematize and
were instead *athematized*?
>
> Also, one could do as follows:
> Take a root
> *ber-
> add irreal -s-
> *ber-s-
> inflect semi-thematically
> bher-s-óm
> bhér-s-s
> bhér-s-t
> (I think I'll leave out the plural)
>
> Voilà, sigmatic aorist.
And what has one (one of decent birthplace, I take it) achieved when
one has done that? Called the sigmatic aorist "irreal"
and "semithematic" although it nowhere is either? This is a kind of
ride I do not find it very apppealing to be takken for.
Jens