From: andrew jarrette
Message: 44000
Date: 2006-03-30
Thak you for your service of providing us with a comprehensive explanation of IE word formation, Piotr - we're actually getting it free.
My comment is the following: IE is traditionally regarded as an analytic language, is it not? (At least its descendants like Latin and Greek are.) But according to the principles you and other IE philologists/linguists have put forth, I see no reason why PIE might not be considered an (originally) agglutinative language, like Finno-Ugric languages. All the inflectional and conjugational endings seem to have been originally quite regular and pan-schematic (by this I mean the same suffixes applied to all varieties of nouns or verbs, etc. - maybe there's a more accurate word, but I can't think of it at the moment), as though they were originally independent words or particles with specific meanings. Where does the line between agglutinative and analytic lie, at least in the case of IE?
Andrew Jarrette
From: Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
Reply-To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [tied] PIE Word Formation (1)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 08:48:17 +0200
>Here's the promised new topic:
>
>------------------------------
>
>Proto-Indo-European Word Formation (1)
>
>1. Nomina: Nouns (Substantives) and Adjectives
>
>Preliminaries
>
>PIE nouns and adjectives (including declinable numerals) fall into the
>same classes and are declined in the same way. The general structure of
>a typical PIE nominal STEM (i.e. a noun or adjective stripped of
>inflectional endings), excluding compounds and morphologically opaque
>words, is as follows:
>
>St- = Rt-S1-S2...-SN-; St- (stem), Rt- (root), -S- (derivational suffix)
>
>That is, such a stem consists of a further unanalysable lexical morpheme
>(ROOT) followed by a string of SUFFIXES. In the process of
>word-derivation suffixes are attached one at a time, always at the end
>of the string, so that the structure is in fact a hierarchy of lexical
>domains:
>
>[Rt-]
>[[Rt-]-S1-]
>[[[Rt-]-S1-]-S2-]
>...
>
>Nouns and adjectives can be derived not only from other nomina but also
>from verbs and undeclinables. In the minimal case, there are no suffixes
>at all, and the stem seems to consist of a bare root: St- = Rt- (e.g.
>*gWHen- 'slayer' from the verb root *gWHen- 'slay'). Such simple
>structures are known as ROOT NOUNS. Actually, since PIE allows "zero
>derivation" (as in Eng.: to ride --> a ride; a hand --> to hand), i.e. a
>change of word-class without adding a visible suffix, root nouns can be
>viewed as stems derived from roots by means of adding a morphological
>zero (NULL SUFFIX). Null suffixation is also possible with more complex
>structures, e.g. turning adjectives into substantives. It may cause an
>accentual shift (again as in Eng.: to conv�rt --> a c�nvert)
>
>Most suffixes contain a single consonant (or one of a very limited set
>of suffixes), which may be preceded by *e (e.g. *-er-, *-en-, *-es-,
>*-ent-), but in the prehistory of PIE frequently co-occurring
>combinations of primitive suffixes must have been fused into
>phonologically more complex strings like *-went-, *-men-, *-ter-, etc.,
>whose internal structure has been obscured, so that they act as unitary
>morphemes. Some of such complex suffixes may originally have been second
>elements of compounds, reduced beyond recognition (cf. English -ly < OE
>-li:c <-- *li:ka- 'shape, form, body').
>
>A stem is called THEMATIC if it ends in *-e/o-. The term is confusing,
>since "theme" is just elegant variation for "stem", so all "stems"
>should be "thematic" by tautology, but the traditional nomenclature
>reflects a mental shortcut: as the _vowel_ in question stands at the end
>of a stem, it is called the THEMATIC VOWEL, and the adjective is
>mechanically applied to the stem itself. In PIE nomina the thematic
>vowel is traditionally written *-o-, since it normally acquired this
>colour across declensional paradigms, but originally it must have been a
>conditioned variant of *-e-; the latter quality is visible when exposed
>in word-final position (as in the voc.sg. *wl.kWe vs. nom.sg. *wl.kWos
>'wolf', acc.sg. *wl.kWom, etc.). Also in collectives (including neuter
>"plurals") and feminine thematic adjectives, when an original thematic
>vowel is followed by *h2, the result is *-ah2 = {eh2}, not {oh2}:
>*now-a-h2 'new (f.)', etc. In some morphological environments the
>thematic vowel may be "replaced" by *-i/j-, and there are reasons to
>believe that it actually _changed_ into *-i/j- at some point in its
>prehistory.
>
>The addition of a suffix may result in changing the vocalism of the
>immediate derivational base. In particular, a suffix with a full vowel
>usually "steals" the accent from the stem, causing the latter to lose
>its vowel. Thus from the root *pleh1- 'fill' we get the verbal adjective
>*pl.h1-n�- 'full'. Similar shifts may be caused by accented inflectional
>endings. As a consequence, only one underlying vowel per stem is
>realised in the surface form. This happens especially in the most
>archaic layers of PIE derivatives; in those formed at a later date, when
>ablaut rules were no longer active phonetic processes, the base normally
>retains its vocalism and the alternation of strong and weak forms is
>restricted to the last suffix of the base (or doesn't occur at all).
>
>In addition to SIMPLEX stems (consisting of one root plus zero, one or
>more suffixes) PIE makes extensive use of COMPOUNDS (two or even more
>stems combined into a single word). In typical compounds, only the final
>element is inflected. Special types of complex stems include
>UNIVERBATIONS (when an original phrase has become "fossilised" as a
>lexical unit, e.g. *[dem-s]-[poti-] '[house-GEN.SG.] + [master]'), and
>REDUPLICATIONS, when a root is preceded by a copy of itself. The copy is
>rarely complete; in most cases only the initial consonant is copied,
>followed by *-e- or *-i-, as in *kWe-kWl-o- 'wheel'. By contrast to
>reduplicated verb stems (of which there are several classes),
>reduplicated nons and adjectives are rare in PIE and mostly belong to
>"expressive" vocabulary. It seems that nominal reduplication ceased to
>be a productive derivational device early in the history of the language.
>
>Piotr
>
>PS: This will be followed by a more detailed discussion of the general
>principles of nominal derivation in the format of questions and answers.
>The warm-up questions will be my own, but I hope for some feedback from
>the list-members.
>
>
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