[tied] Re: PIE Word Formation (1)

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

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
>
> > I suspect the thematic inflection became the "open" one, in the
> > sense that foreign words were assigned to it. That would explain

why

> > *ekW-o-, *taur-o- and *wlkW-ó- (?) are thematic.
>
> It's *wl.'kWo-. But there are PIE or sub-PIE nouns which are

certainly

> borrowed (those above need not be) and which are not o-stems, e.g.
> *septm. 'seven' *pelek^u- 'axe'. It's true that the thematic
> decelension eventually became the default one in the PIE noun system,
> but it's a poor diagnostic test for detecting loans.
>

Actually I wasn't proposing the idea of the thematic inflection as the
open one as a way of identifying loans. Kuhn points out that *ekWo-,
*tauro- are counterexamples, to his division of loans into early, non-
thematic and late, thematic ones, since those two animals supposedly
were with the IE's from the beginning.


Torsten