[tied] Re: sum

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:

> pielewe wrote:
>
> > I don't want to suggest that competent reconstruction on the

basis of

> > _all_ attestations would really yield *sUmI, though. Absence of

*U is

> > abundantly attested, for instance, in Novgorod birchbark letters
> > beginning in the first half of the twelfth century, e.g. 119,

which is

> > written in dialect.
>
> Cf. Old Polish jes'm', enclitic -(e)s'm' < *(j)esmI, eventually

reduced

> to -(e)m- in Middle and Modern Polish. A Proto-Slavic yer in *sUmI

would

> have yielded OPol. sem (totally unknown). There is a _secondary_

prop

> vowel in Czech jsem, etc., regular in this position. Of course

nobody

> who knows anything about the history of Slavic needs to be told

that --

> it's all for the sake of Torsten's education.
>

Excuse me, that's Willem you're trying to educate.
But nasty sideswipes like that tell me I must be on to something.

'jestem' is inflected like 'byl\em', right?


Torsten