Re: [tied] *-je/o- [was: IE thematic presents...]

glen gordon wrote:

> Just had an afterthought of my own. The reason why
> I can't readily accept that *logH-e-ye- is just a
> denominal from *logH-o- is because the vocalism
> doesn't add up. We see the paradigmatic alternation
> of *pod- with *ped- reflecting original accentuation
> on and off the root respectively. So if this pattern
> is ancient (and why wouldn't it be??), we'd expect
> **legH-e-ye- or if possible, zerograding to
> **lgH-e-ye- in the absence of accent.

Who says that there's only one source of PIE *o? The *o of thematic
deverbative adjectives is normally unaccented. On the other hand, the
durative-forming suffix *-je/o- is normally accented, so one would
expect it to have been originally accented in the *logH-éje- type as well.

> So the preservation of an unaccented *o fights
> against all odds, in my view.
>
> What's more, it would seem strange that these
> presumably **post-IE** thematic duratives, being
> hypothetically reduced to nothing more than
> subjunctives, would still manage to unmistakingly
> reflect the presence or absence of thematic vowel in
> their respective causative forms if indeed causatives
> were ancient enough to be pushed back so far in time!
> I can't imagine why newer "duratives" would associate
> themselves with the causative forms of all things.

I don't think causatives in *-éje- are associated with "thematic
duratives". The scenario I have presented makes them a class of
denominative verbs. As far as it's possible to pair them with another
class of verb stems, they seem to correlate with reduplicated aorists,
but that doesn't mean that there is a genetic relationship between the
two types.

> So if causatives are as ancient as we all expect
> them to be... it would seem they are testimony to
> the ancient character of thematic presents. I think
> we still need a 'durative' theme in *-e- for the
> earlier stages of pre-IE before Syncope.

But the causatives have *-je/o- as the stem-forming element; that's
different from the bare thematic vowel *-e/o-, unless you insist on
splutting *-je/o- into smaller morphemes, for which I see no motivation.

Piotr