Re: [tied] Re: PIE suffix *-ro - 'similar-with'

On 2006-01-10 05:56, theharmoniousblacksmith wrote:

> Much by coincidence I am these days thinking exactly about that.
> Wrestling against it would be more fair to my current state :).
> Anyway, about the present primary desinences of the athematic verbs,
> for instance, please, could anyone help me to understand it's origin?
> For me it seems easy to accept that the *-m- in *-mi came from the 1st
> singular pronoun (h1me, before *eg'h- was added?).

I'm not sure at all there was an original *h1- in the m-pronoun, or that
*(h1)eg^om contains two pronouns rather than *h1eg^- plus an ending
borrowed from the 1sg. of verbs (hence also the variant *(h1)eg^o:).
Anyway, the fact that *m appears both in the 1sg./pl. of verbs and the
oblique forms of the first-person pronoun doesn not look like coincidence.

> The 2nd is a bit strange, because if it came from *tuH, it should be
> -ti, not *-si. May it be because of -ti > *-si ? If so, why not on
> plural? Maybe *-i is the guilty one? The sing. 3rd should be -si too,
> if it remained the same since before the change of the 2nd.

The so-called "primary" ending *-si in the present tense contains 2.sg.
*-s plus the tense marker *-i. The imperfect of *bHere-s-i 'you are
carrying' is *e bHere-s 'you were carrying', and the temporally
unspecified (injunctive) form is *bHeres. The last form is simpler and
presumably more primitive than the others. The alternation between final
*-s and non-final *-t- in 2pl. -te- has vague parallels elsewhere in the
PIE grammatical system, cf. the correlation between *-es- nouns and
*-eto- adjectives. *t and *s also alternate in some paradigms like that
of *-wo:t-/*-us- (perfect participles). We may be dealing with an old
(pre-PIE) affricate that had developed into a stop or fricative in
different environments, unclear as the details are, since the relevant
paradigms have suffered much analogical reshaping.

> But the 3rd is by large much stranger. Where is this *-nti from, o
> Iuppiter? It certainly help if it's related to the *-r of the middle
> voice, but still it seems not to be from any pronoun. As, at least in
> Latin (still the only ancient IE language in which I can cry for help)
> there is no 3rd personal pronoun, it seems quite coherent to not have
> that desinence from it, but still we have desinence, and now,
> coherently, without a good place to find...

It's thinkable that 3sg. *-t and 3pl. -(e)nt/-(e)r come from the same
pre-PIE source, namely the *-nt- element also found in the present
participle. If so, they were originally nominal rather than verbal forms
and don't contain a personal pronoun.

> BTW, since my early post about the h1es- verb, I am much interested in
> IEan studies. Any suggestion about how to study it on college, since
> my university (USP - www.usp.br ) doesn't have that course?

Few universities do, these days. But if you have any general linguistic
training and know something about the methods of historical linguistics,
you can learn a lot about IE studies from reading good coursebooks (and
then monographs and articles) on your own. Something like Benjamin
Fortson's _Indoeuropean Language and Culture: An Introduction_ (2004)
could be a good starting-point.

Piotr