Re: i-verbs in Baltic and Slavic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> That leaves the infinitive, where, despite the wildly
> different (i~ vs. a~) development in the present forms,
> Slavic and Baltic show remarkable agreement down to the
> (acute) intonation: Slavic -i"ti, Lith. -ýti. Where can
> this acute come from? There are a few possibilities in
> Slavic, but the Lithuanian form can, or so I think, only be
> explained as *-iH- (certainly not *-ei- or *-eiH-).

But what do you make of the verbal adjective *-i-to- (Lat. monitus,
etc., Ved. -itá-), which strongly suggests that the (short) *i belongs
to the base of the causative-iterative (and is independent of the
present-forming *-je/o-)? If we forget about BSl. for a moment,
something like *monéi-je/o- (rather than the handbook form
*mon-éje/o-, into which it was eventually contracted) seems to be the
original shape of the present stem. One would accordingly expect a
BSl. infinitive like **-i-té(:)i, which of course doesn't exist, but
the lengthening and the acute intonation may be analogical (after
*-eh1-, *-ah2- as verb suffixes).

> This takes me back to an old idea of mine, that the
> causative-iterative is an old compund of verbal root
> (showing o-grade with "Rasmussen infix", which must have
> some meaning) plus the verb "to make" [ = Hittite iyami,
> iyezzi etc.] This would also explain the intercalation of
> the preverb pV- [Hitt. piyami, piyezzi] in Vedic
> causatives-iteratives such as dha:-páya "cause to put",
> jña-páya "cause to know", etc.

My favourite idea is that the causatives were denominative (hence the
R-fix), e.g. *woidé(i)-je-, related to *woido- (= Skt. veda) + *-je-,
perhaps via *R-wjd-o- reduced to *R-wjd-j- before an originally
accented suffix (*-jé-) and then receiving a prop vowel which attracts
the accent from the suffix. This of course doesn't explain OInd.
-a:-p-aya-, but then this hypercharacterised causative is a strictly
local speciality and could even be Dravidian-influenced (cf. PDrav.
causative *-pi-).

Piotr

> The verbal root in question is given in LIV as *Hyeh1-
> "werfen". I see no unsurmountable problems in assuming the
> verb was grammaticalized as a causative marker, and in the
> process metathesized to *(H)eih1-e- (and besides, the
> Hittite form can easily be from original *Heih1-e-,
> postponing the metathesis of the independent verb to a later
> stage ancestral to Greek ie:mi and Latin iacio:). The first
> laryngeal is lost in the composition, the second one is
> taken care of by the thematic vowel and the syllable break,
> so: *R-weid Héih1-e-ti > *woidéyeti "he makes see".
>
> The second laryngeal does surface in the Balto-Slavic
> infinitive, which is athematic and stressed on the ending
> *-té(:)i, leaving the causative marker in zero grade
> *-(H)ih1-. That would explain the Balto-Slavic acute.