Re: [tied] Re: i-verbs in Baltic and Slavic

On 2006-05-25 11:06, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:

> On Wed, 24 May 2006 08:20:38 +0000, Piotr Gasiorowski
> <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> I wasn't suggesting there were problems. I was merely
> ponting out that -itus is not something we only see in
> causative verbs.

However, one of your two examples (<domitus>) _is_ most likely derived
from an original *-éje- verb! Apart from the small class it represents,
most other cases of <-itus> have a short vowel from a vocalised
laryngeal, like Lat. vomitus, so it doesn't look as though the short /i/
had ranged freely in Latin.

> I think Balto-Slavic -i"ti/-ýti and the Vedic future in
> -ayi-s.yá- show that the causative morpheme, when athematic,
> was *-(e)ih1-. The laryngeal was regularly suppressed in
> the more common thematic forms (*-éyh1-e/o- > *-éy-e/o-),

By the way, why are they so consistently thematic? The verb 'throw' isn't.

> so
> it wouldn't surprise me if a secondary zero-grade form /i/
> was abstracted from that.

Just in case you think I'm hostile to you idea, I'm not. It's an
impressive analysis, even if it isn't the whole truth. I'm myself
interested to see which of the competing explanations gets closer to
explaining _all_ the branch-specific problems. The idea that Indic -p-
may be a prefix is really brilliant and _almost_ makes me accept the
compound analysis, except that there seem to be no traces of prefixation
outside Indic (not even in Iranian). I'm planning to experiment with
various compromise solutions and if any of them seems to work, I'll
compare notes with you immediately :)

Piotr