[tied] Re: PIE Word Formation Q&A (1)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> On 2006-04-03 16:57, Rob wrote:
>
> > I suppose that this development is possible, given the relative
> > similarity between /r/ and /n/. However, I am unsure about both
> > *-tó- and *-nó- going back to the NT-participle. What would be
> > the conditioning factors here?
>
> Phonological. Roughly, *-n- after oral stops and non-vocalised
> laryngeals, *-t- elsewhere (Olsen), but I think this condition
> should be somehow revised, taking into account factors such as the
> place of articulation (my feeling is that with dentals the variant
> -t[s]t- was always preferred). The evidence is difficult to
> interpret, since analogy, working both ways, often introduced
> secondary variants.

Yes, "phonological" is what I meant. :) By "oral stops", do you mean
non-bilabial stops? On another note, I don't understand how such a
rule could have worked when there are both e.g. *plhnós and *plhtós
attested in descendant languages. Or do you think that the latter was
not native to IE, but merely a subsequent innovation?

Unfortunately, it appears that the analysis of the origin of the *-nó-
and *-tó- participles strains the bounds of internal reconstruction.

> >> (2) When a thematic adjective is derived from an already thematic
> >> base, e.g. RV as'vya- 'pertaining to horses' from <as'va-> horse.
> >
> > This does not seem to follow, given e.g. the "thematic" genitive
> > plural *-o:m < *-o-om. In other words, *o + *o > *o:, not *io or
> > *yo.
>
> This is inflection, not derivation, and may have worked according to
> its own principles. Cf. English, where e.g. /-Ng/ is obligatorily
> simplified to /N/ before inflectional endings (and word-finally) but
> not before derivational suffixes (prolo/N/-i/N/ vs.
> prolo/Ng/-ation). I'm not even absolutely sure that the above
> analysis of the gen.pl. ending is correct. It assumes that the
> actual ending was *-om, but I can't see any good evidence of
> contrast between thematic and athematic gen.pl. endings in any of
> the branches.

With English, I think the difference can be attributed to the
placement of stress, i.e. prolónging vs. prolongátion. There are also
some dialects of English (for example, Southern American English),
that pronounce <ng> as [Ng] whenever it is not word-final (and, in
some areas, even word-finally). I would suggest that the phenomenon
of which you speak is related to the phenomenon of "dental weakening",
whereby a dental stop is weakened when unstressed.

From what I have read, there are only two possibilities for the base
realization of the gen. pl., *-om or *-o:m. If the latter, then the
thematic form would be identical to the athematic, after the reduction
of double-long *-o::m (or *-oo:m) to *-o:m. Either way, however, the
point remains the same: the thematic genitive plural seems to be a
counter-example to the proposition that the thematic vowel weakens to
*i/y when another vowel is attached. To me, it seems that inflection
and derivation operated under very similar, if not the same, principles.

> > This may seem controversial, but I would like to put forth the
> > idea that the adjectival (diminutive) suffix *-iko and the
> > feminine suffix *-ix (= *-ih2) are, in origin, one and the same.
> > The former suffix, then, would comprise a base form *-ik with the
> > (animate) genitive ending *-ós, while the latter would continue
> > the base form in word-final position, where the *-k was lenited to
> > *-x (= *-h2).
>
> An interesting thought.

Why, thanks. :)

Please don't hold back any criticism -- I'm here to learn as much as I
am here to discuss.

- Rob