Re: IE Thematic Vowel Rule

>It may put things into perspective to remember that the
> thematic vowel rule is still directly observable in Modern Greek

and

> in part also in some Slavic languages,

On the subject, Russian has, in what looks to me like athematic
verbs either

berú
berës^
berët
(-ë- = -yó-)

or

mogú
móz^es^
móz^et

I got a couple of pages into an article by you on Balto-Slavic
Stress. I gathered this much:

PIE mobile stress stays.
PIE end-stress becomes mobile.

Have I got it right, and, if yes, how does it apply here?

>and indirectly in the
> distribution of umlaut in the Albanian verb. These pieces of

evidence

> still match each other quite well, so one would think their common
> source is of relatively recent date. Now, the source, whatever it

was,

> is definitely older than the IE protolanguage, so its effects have
> been lingering on for at least five millennia. Then the
> ultimate "real" source of the thematic vowel rule does not have to

be

> something created just yesterday either.
>

All true. You didn't take a position on whether the thematic stem
and the person and number endings were independent words recently?

Now if it's the way I believe it happened, then the thematic
inflection is a static-stress-ification of an old semi-thematic
inflection. That proposal, since it implies a modification of
an "existing model", doesn't need thematic stem and person and
number endings to have been independent words recently. It also
explains why it was introduced in both verbs and nouns; the common
purpose was stress-regularisation, not a morphological or semantic
one.



Torsten