From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 44466
Date: 2006-05-03
To be precise, it occurs also in Iranian, so if it's a branch-specific
innovation, it's at least Indo-Iranian. But something like *-o:s-es,
even if not of PIE date, could have arisen more than once. One could
imagine that the original *-s was reinterpreted as a nominative ending
requiring the agglutination of an explicit plural marker, cf. acc.pl.
*-o:ns (-o:m-s).---------------I've never heard of this acc. pl. in *-o:ns (as opposed to *-ons). What is it, what is its origin, and is it the form that regularly occurred in Germanic, or certain branches of Germanic?
In West Germanic (if the acc.pl. ending did not replace the nom.pl., as
in Old High German), *-o:ziz > *-o:z > *-o:s, with Ingvaeonic reflexes,
especially OE -as.
Piotr
----------------------Why then doesn't OE have -s for the nominative singular of masculine a-stems, -(e)s for the nominative singular of masculine i-stems, and -(u)s for the nominative singular of masculine u-stems? Or is it that there had to originally be a vowel following the *-z, which was lost causing new final *-z, then devoicing to /s/? (I.e. distinction between old *-z and new *-z from *-zV(z))
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