--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:
>
> On 2006-03-15 13:50, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
> > But I wonder whether there is sufficient evidence to warrant
> > a reconstruction n. *h1wosu, mf. *h1wé:sus. In particular,
> > *h1we:su- is attested very poorly (Pokorny's Gaul. Vi:suri:x
> > besides Gmc. Wisuri:h seems arbitrary).
>
> True. With an archaic paradigm we use whatever broken fragments
can be
> found and glued back together. I'll think of further examples. I
haven't
> got a copy of Jens Rasmussen's "Studien zur Morphophonemik..."
(1989) to
> hand, but I believe he shows some evidence of the pattern there
(Jens,
> could you help us if my recollection is correct?)
I'm afraid I show very little evidence other than what you have
quoted. But you are asking a lot: What does an i- or u-stem paradigm
made from a long-vowel root have in its neuter singular as opposed
to the rest of the paradigm? A case where we have no long vowel is
*pl.H1-ú-s, ntr. *pélH1-u (Goth. filu, OIr. il). So, if it is just a
matter of accent retraction in the neuter I would expect *H1wé:s-u
and not *H1wós-u. Today, I would rather explain the o-forms from the
collective, i.e. **H1wé:s-w-H2 > *H1wé::swH2 > **H1wéoswH2 >
**H1wó:swH2 > **H1wóswH2 > *H1wós-u-H2, with analogical singular
*H1wós-u. There is the embarrassing point however that the root of
viel seems to be not *pelH1-, but *pleH1-, in which case the -e- of
*pélH1-u would be a post-ablaut insertion. That makes the whole
thing exceedingly complicated: If you can't trust the ablaut grades
of the fossils what can you trust? There is a lot more about the
matter in Paul Widmer's book "Das Korn des weiten Feldes - interne
Derivation, Derivationskette und Flexionsklassenhierarchie: Aspekte
der nominalen Wortbildung im Urindogermanischen" (Innsbruck 2004),
which is unfortunately written in a style that makes for very
stressful reading.
Jens