Re: [tied] PIE athematic neuters

On Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:04:50 +0100, Piotr Gasiorowski
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>My current view (very tentative, but I'm still thinking) is that the
>*-r/n(t)- neuters are in fact old -nt- neuter participles (hitherto,
>essentially, a lost tribe since there is little other evidence of such a
>formation).

I think some of them may be, especially the ones where
there's evidence for -t in the NA sg. in Indo-Iranian
(yakr.t) or Armenian (leard), but I see no reason to think
they _all_ go back to nt-neuters. Since there are no n-stem
neuters except the ones in *-mn., it stand to reason to
think that all other n-stem neuters, following regular sound
law, developed into neuter r/n-heteroclitics.

>> Now I too have been wondering about the peculiarities of the
>> neuter in this respect, and I've had a suspicion for quite
>> some time now: what if it's not a peculiarity of the neuters
>> that they have heavy stems, but that it's a peculiarity of
>> heavy stems that they are neuter? The nominative and
>> accusative endings *-z and *-m are asyllabic and the only
>> ones to be so, and a soundlaw that drops them after a heavy
>> / long vowel syllable is not unthinkable.
>
>It seems to me that the quantitative anomaly in question is restricted
>to the nom./acc. of neuters; there's nothing funny about the other
>cases. In other words, it looks like a process which affects not the
>stem as such, but only an individual case form.

I don't follow. If there's nothing peculiar about the other
cases in the neuters, there is nothing peculiar in the
nom/acc. either, or there is something peculiar about both,
both in neuters and non-neuters. There is no fundamental
difference in Ablaut between a neuter like *dórur, *dérwos
or an animate like *pó:ds/*pódm., *péds. The difference is,
as you said, one of distribution: neuters are almost always
static or amphidynamic, while "animates" occur in all types,
the most common ones being proterodynamic or hysterodynamic
(the *pod-/*ped-type would seem to be limited to root
nouns?).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...