Richard:
> If I understand you, you are saying that the
> nominative / accusative was in origin the gentive
> plural -om.
I don't think you quite get it, but you're close.
I'm saying that the nominative and accusative are
UNMARKED as they should be for inanimate nouns.
That makes it the same as all other inanimate nouns,
nej?
Second, all nouns in *-om are genitival derivatives.
So we can lump *pedom-, *yugom-, *dHgHom- and the like
together, regardless of their gender, into the same
etymological class of old abstract/uncountable
genitival derivatives.
Now, knowing that, it must be understood that the
genitive plural *-om is not in origin the "genitive
plural". It originally is a locative meaning "within,
amongst".
IE *-om therefore originally lent a nuance of being
in an uncountable crowd (hence its adoption
specifically into the plural inflection with an
ablative sense). Before this, the *s-genitive was used
in both singular and plural to convey possession, as
in
Etruscan and other Tyrrhenian languages. Inanimates
were incapable of possession, of course, and only
had the *l-partitive to convey other aspects of the
later IE genitive. Get it? Good.
So *yugom- is to be understood as originally from
eLIE *yug-an and its locative originally was
unmarked like a normal inanimate locative. It was
given the animate locative *-i later.
Vowel shift caused *yugom (and *yugomi in the
locative). Then *m-Omission was enacted: locative
*yugoi. From there, *m-Omission spread to other
oblique cases. That's not a very hard feat considering
that inanimates only have the "singular" (or
rather "number-inspecific") inflection to deal with.
= gLeN
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