Re: The personal pronouns of PIE (and other families) are loans

It seems entirely plausible that Nostratic *m and *n have survived
with little or no change. They seem to be fairly stable phonemes
across all language families. But lets try to stay away from the
Nostratic hypothesis here.

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
>
> >
> > > ***
> > > Patrick:
> > >
> > > There would be no example of PIE *nu becoming *m if this is not
> > it;
> > > consequently, like the -*n-infix, I do not believe it is probable
> > though, of
> > > course, anything is possible.
> >
> > Miguel uses a suffix *-mu which he uses to derive forms in -m, -w-
> > and -o: (if memory serves), but anything you can get get from *-mu,
> > you can get from *-nu too, plus it matches an existing morpheme. As
> > for the uniqueness, that's what you must expect in fused verbal
> > constructions, cf. the Romance future and conditional.
> >
> > ***
> > Patrick:
> >
> > When anyone utilizes a unique process to explain something, he
> must be aware
> > that others will consider probability in evaluating the
> explanation -
> > particularly when more probable explanations are available as
> alternative
> > explanations.
> >
> > Like your proposal, I think Miguel's is _possible_ but highly
> improbable.
> >
>
> Actually, my proposal gets worse than that; I think my *-nu suffix
> was once *mnu < *mVn-u, the 'me' root plus locative *-u, thus "at
> me" (or "at mind".
>
>
> Nostraticists want us to believe that personal pronouns are
> inherited, not borrowed. What I can't understand then, is, how come
> eg. the reflexes of *mVn- "me" (cf Etrusc. mini, Finnish minä)
> aren't horribly disfigured by the phonetic developments in the
> respective branches, given the time depth of the splits between the
> member groups of Nostratic? Why are they still so similar?
> Can we infer from the survival of *mVn- in those separate branches,
> that Proto-Nostratic *m and *n have survived? I don't think so.
>
>
> Torsten
>