Miguel:
> No, *-iH is the athematic form.
Yes, I know, but *-i- derives from _thematic_ *-o-
because of Schwa Diffusion and Merger. It is only
when *& became *i in certain positions that it
no longer had the look of a true thematic anymore.
So it was assumed to be athematic with consonant *y.
Let's go through Schwa Diffusion one more time.
It's clear that *e/*o alternation in the thematic
vowel goes back to a single common vowel. In my
theory, it's the everyday schwa *& before Schwa
Diffusion.
Schwa Diffusion lengthens posttonic *& before voiced
segments. The lengthened variants of *& then in
turn eventually merge to *a via Schwa Merger, then
Vowel Shift takes care of the rest (creating *o in
those positions as we see).
However, what about pretonically?
Pretonically, Schwa Diffusion creates a different
effect on *&. It _raises_ the vowel to *I in open
syllables such as is later evidenced in reduplicated
present stems (eg: *didehW- < *dIdéhW-). No, there
is no druidic *-i- suffix in the midst. It is not
a morpheme at all. It is trivially and purely a
product of simple vowel shifts. We also see *& > *I
in compounds containing a thematic first element.
This latter development is the source of nouns being
used in *-i- that are in effect semantically identical
to those in *-o- but were only originally meant to
be compounding stems.
As I mentioned in the beginning, those "compounding"
stems in *-I- came to be used by themselves, and
when Schwa Merger took over, *I merged to *i, making
it a consonant-ending stem (aka athematic) since *i
is caused by the zerograding of the consonant *y in
the majority of cases.
It is then through the development of *i-stems like
these that adjectives in *-i- also develop by the
simple shift of accent to the final syllable.
= gLeN
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