On neuters in *-om:
> I should have said: "neuters were not allowed as
> subjects of transitive sentences."
>
> Still, that leaves the -om of neuter thematics in
> intransitive sentences unexplained.
Very much so.
> In the personal pronouns, it appears as a
> genitive/accusative under the shape *-mé/*-wé:
Oh please don't connect that to this! This is
desperate. The genitive is attested as *mene in IE.
End of story. Any of the fewer reflexes showing *meme
would easily be caused by simple assimilation.
It even relates to Tyrrhenian *mine (> Etruscan
acc. /mini/, no /m/ there!) to further underline that
it can only be *n even in the older Indo-Tyrrhenian
stage.
If that's not enough, we have ample correlation with
other Steppe languages like Uralic and Altaic,
showing what is firmly an oblique *n in the 1ps!
And if there is any consensus in Nostratic, it is
in fact concerning the presence of a pronominal
oblique *n! There is no **m here unless you're
speaking of the very seperate morpheme -- accusative
*-m.
On Uralic and Altaic:
> Indefinite objects do not take the accusative
> marker.
Yes, so that should be the tip-off that analysizing
the *m in *yugom as an accusative marker is
fundamentally erroneous.
On the topic of accusative *-m in IE/Ur/Alt/etc:
> All of this seems to indicate that the accusative
> in *-m is of pronominal origin, and based on the
> pronoun *ma (*mu-a in IE and Altaic).
This is where I can agree with you, Miguel. I do
think that in Nostratic or even pre-Nostratic, this
was the case. This is because it was originally a
locative marker. It's application to both ergatives
(via an agentive function) and accusatives (via
a terminative function) becomes more transparent this
way.
We even agree here on the original Nostratic form of
the interrogative stem as *ma. However, it entered
Proto-Boreal as *mi- via the Proto-Steppe compound
*ma-i (< *ma "what" + *i [3ps]). As far as I can
tell now, it did _not_ enter Indo-Tyrrhenian since we
find the Tyrrhenian interro-relative form *i-pa (<
ITyr *kWa).
> The fact that neither in the pronouns (*-d), nor in
> the definite (*-o-m), nor in the indefinite (*-0),
To this date, Miguel, you have not succesfully shown
how *-o-m is at all 'definite', let alone accusative
(despite the presence of *-m in the _nominative_
and _vocative_). This is still idle speculation,
possibly even contradicted by the existing evidence.
As you have admitted, inanimates don't get *-m in
IE (by comparison with Uralic and Altaic). So this
is an unsurmountable flaw in your design.
= gLeN
______________________________________________________
Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/