Miguel:
> In other words: there are no hysterodynamic neuters,
> m-stems or otherwise.
Alright, I give up, but not exactly because of this
point. Thinking more on this, I have to admit that
if I should pursue this idea any further, there is an
another unsurmountable problem within the context
of my theory regarding *yugom.
'Nominative Misanalysis' of genitival stems would
have occured centuries before Vowel Shift and the
hypothesized change of 1ps thematic *-omi > *-owi
> *-o:. So the *m should in fact be lost long before
(ie: *-om is misanalysed to *-o-m in the originally
endingless NAV cases).
Sigh. Thanx for the resistence, Miguel :) You win
this round.
Nonetheless, I don't think it's a great sin for me
to ponder on whether a regular sound change is behind
the development of *-o:. I still think that the only
possible origin of it is via earlier *-o-mi. The more
I think about it, the nasalization from *m would
probably have transfered to the following *i in this
unstressed intervocalic environment.
Now, I don't know about your general view on /i~/ in
languages but I don't see that often in the world.
I'd think it's likely for the nasality itself to
quickly sink /i~/ to /e~/. That would yield */-o(w)e~/
out of earlier *-o-mi, which then can very easily
become our lovely suffix *-o: by the concatenation of
*o and *e.
> It just proves that neuter thematics like *yugóm
> are really thematics, not m-stems, and that it's
> absolutely out of the question that the -m belongs
> to the stem.
While I admit *yugom probably doesn't have to do with
*-o: like I thought earlier, there is no way that
you can miss the fact that thematic nouns (which
mirror their adjectival counterparts) are originally
genitival derivatives in gen.sg *-os (> animate
*-o-s) and gen.pl *-om (> inanimate collective *-o-m).
So, yes, *-m _must_ have once been part of the stem
whether you like it or not.
There is nothing that you've posted yet that can
better explain the origin of the (pseudo)suffix *-m
in the inanimate thematics. Without the event of
Nominative Misanalysis, you're grasping in the dark
on the etymological source of this 'inanimate' *-m
and you run the danger of reconstructing phantom
morphology in Nostratic.
= gLeN
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