> Yes, English is famous for that. So is Dutch, to a
> lesser degree. And Chinese even more. Parallels in
> PIE, nope.
You spoke too soon: PIE *?nomn-ye- from the noun
*?nomn "name".
If it were original a phrase */?nomn yos/ "that
which has a name", then it stands to follow that
zero derivation once existed in pre-IE as well. Here,
the phrase lacks a verb stem because early Late IE
lacked a verb "to have". (Sure, it had *qep- but this
I think was more like "to grasp, to take".) So *yo-
here functions as it came to be used in the thematic
genitive: to convey possession. Hence the phrase
means "that which has a name". Thus a 1ps derivation
of this would be *?nomnyo: "I have a name" => "I
am called".
> German and Russian don't do that either.
> Nor your beloved French.
I don't know whether this is true for German because
somehow I think that that language has a lot of tricks
up its sleeve but you're right about French, as well
as Japanese. This paper relates to the topic of what
is termed 'zero derivation':
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/jur/200309/papers/paper_larosa.html
In French and Japanese, it's true that the rule
seems to be to use the equivalent of "to do". Example:
French "faire le ménage" = "to housework"
("to do the tidying-up")
Japanese "benkyoo o shimasu" = "to study"
("to do studies")
> In other words, the closer a language gets to the
> pure isolating type, the more suffixless cross-over
> like that it will have.
Exactly.
> And PIE was heavily inflecting.
Yes PIE was, but it doesn't look like pre-IE was.
The further back in time, the more agglutinating
it becomes. This is a common observation of
Nostraticists, I think.
= gLeN
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