Re: [tied] PIE athematic neuters

On Sun, 19 Mar 2006 09:32:00 -0500, andrew jarrette
<jarretteandrew@...> wrote:

>I am writing this because I regret my reply to Miguel Carrasquer Vidal's
>explanation of neuter u-stems as r/n-stems. Nevertheless, perhaps
>it wasn't posted -- I hope it wasn't deemed offensive, because that surely
>wasn't the intention. I hope I did not come across as attacking Mr.
>Vidal's hypothesis unfairly.

Not at all.

>But since writing that message, I have thought
>about neuter u-stems and remembered that what Mr. Vidal is saying about
>them does ring true for Sanskrit: I remembered that all neuter
>u-stems have a connecting -n- in oblique cases before vowels,
>which suggests that they may have terminated in *-n at one stage, at least
>in these oblique cases, and hence with *-r in the nom./acc. sg.
>So perhaps I was too hasty to judge. But two problems arise:
>one is that not only the neuter u-stems have connecting -n- in
>Sanskrit, also the neuter i-stems have this.

But decidedly less so. Apart from the Isg. -ina: (also
masculine), and the Gpl. (which has -n- for completely
unrelated reasons), other forms with -n- are extremely rare
in the i-stems (there are 14 cases of NApl.n. -i:ni in the
Rgveda, as opposed to 100 without the connecting -n-). This
is then likely to be a late analogy after the characteristic
pattern of the neuter u-stems.

I do think that _some_ i-stems do indeed contain a suffix
**-in-, but the only example that has some reasonable
evidence going for it is *poti- "lord", f. *pot-n-ih2. The
expected Nsg. form would have been *pot-yo:n (Asg. *pot-im <
*pot-yn-m), which is reflected in Tocharian <petso>.
Elswhere, analogy imposed *potis.

>This suggests that
>these also may have been originally r/n stems -- if this was the case,
>wouldn't we expect -r in neuter i-stems also in Armenian?
>The other problem is, final -r regularly appears as visarga
>(-h.) in Sanskrit. If these neuter stems originally ended
>in *-ur or *-ir in the nom./acc. sg., wouldn't one expect to find -h.
>in Sanskrit, at least in some recorded forms?

What I observe is that the -r has only survived in Armenian,
and has been lost everywhere else, including Vedic.

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