--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> I think you mean an anti-Hittite army, if the effect would
> be to change the Hittite language? ;-)
> Also the two opposing parties would have to speak languages
> so similar that they were able to distinguish subjunctives
> in the speech of the other party. Which event was that?
I was not being very serious. But history is full of reports of
hostilities between peoples that are very closely related. We are
talking about changes in a language which *became* Hittite; I don't
know if that makes a bullying force imagined in the scenario Hittite
or anti-Hittite.
[Torsten:]
> Let me try to rephrase, in order to understand.
>
> PIE split into three groups:
> 1. Hittite
> 2. Tocharian
> 3. 'neo-IE'
> In group 3. there exists a group of verbal roots which
> are inflected according to a special paradigm, the
> thematic paradigm. They are not found in group 1. or
> group 2.
>
> OK?
No, the thematic present is indeed found in group 2 (Tocharian).
There are not so many of them as in other branches, though. Some say
that's because they had not made so many by the time the branch left
the trunk. I rather see it as a residue, so that the Toch. thematic
presents are the last ones remaining after most members had been
transferred to other classes.
>
> From this, the collected linguistic wisdom concludes
> that this group of verbal roots existed in PIE.
>
> Huh? I don't get it.
>
> The justification you give here is that they look just
> as old as anything else in IE.
> No they don't. *ag^- contains an /a/, for instance.
> And they are all prominent members of Bomhard's and
> anyone else's attempted Nostractic root collection,
> which makes me suspicious. If the language families
> that survived to this day in our part of the are all
> descended from languages of a tribe who 'got it', when
> the various neolithic tecnological revolutions passed
> by them, then there almost has to be a package of roots
> for designating items of that technology loaned into the
> founder languages of those surviving language families,
> and I believe *bher- (< *bhar-), *ag^-, *weg^- (< *wag^-)
> etc were such roots.
The root "ag^-" shows some very archaic morphophonemic features.
There is a reduplicated present in Ved. i:jate 'drives' from *Hí-Hg^-
e-tor. By normal standards that would go with a root aorist *Hág^-t
of which *Hág^-e-ti would be the original subjunctive, so that this
is just another instance of an aorist subjunctive turned present.
The same root forms Greek ago:gé: 'leadership', parallel with
edo:dé: 'food', odo:dé: 'smell'. Vine has vindicated the old
analysis of these as original *o:gá:, *o:dá:, *o:dá: with
disambiguating addition of ag-, ed-, od- by his identification of
Mycenaean o-ka as /o:gá:/ with a meaning 'leadership'. I have added
my own analysis to that: *o-Hg^-é-H2, i.e. the tomé: type with
the "infix" vowel preserved in its original prefix position. There
is no way this can reflect a post-PIE lexeme. The same goes for
*bher- whose old present is seen in Ved. bibhárti, Gk. piphránai,
and which also supplies some lengthened-grade Narten gems that just
cannot be of a younger vintage.
I am not opposed to your identification of *Hag^- with similar words
outside IE, and I do not at all exclude that it is an old loanword.
Only the borrowing must then be very old, i.e. belong to a time when
the type with prefixing of the "o-fix" was still productive, and the
events of metathesis and zero-grade had not yet occurred. It may be
noted that we do not, to my knowledge, have any independent evidence
as to the identity of the laryngeal of the root. LIV posits *H2eg^-,
but that is of course just a deliberate choice made for the sake of
simplicity. Rix was very explicit on that point. This is why I just
posit *Hag^-, meaning, on a deeper level, any one of the four
possibilities *H1ag^-, *H2ag^-, *H3ag^-, *H2eg^-. If the root has
independent /a/, and the IE relatively monotonous vocalism reflects
a collapse of a more variegated vowel system, then the borrowing is
younger than that collapse. I see no evidence against this.
>
> Similarly, group 3 has roots starting in *r-, Hittite
> doesn't. Therefore PIE had roots in *r-??
>
> I'd say no.
Of course not "therefore". But for other reasons I am rather sure IE
did have roots with initial *r-.
Jens