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

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, glen gordon <glengordon01@...>
wrote:

>
>
> > 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".

You are using your hypothesis to prove your hypothesis. I am not
convinced.

>
>
> > 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

The more you know a language, the less tricks it seems to have. I
have German channels on cable, and as far as hear it, grammatically
it hasn't changed much since the school textbooks were writen.

Dutch glimlachen "smile"
voetballen "play football"

German **fussballen "play football", no way.

>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:

The Dutch are fond of it too.

>
> 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.

Well, there's no defense against that argument.

I still like my periphrastic > univerbation theory better.


Torsten