On 2006-08-12 21:12, Andrew Jarrette wrote:
> I personally like the idea presented in the paper written by the
> Finnish academe that you directed me to, that Slavic *-o in neuters
> comes from a variant ending IE *-o instead of *-om that Slavic
> developed, most likely to parallel the endingless i-stem and u-stem
> neuters, at a time when neuter gender was still an important
> distinction in the ancestor of Slavic and thus an ending
different
> from the masc. acc. sg. might have been desirable.
> Andrew
Somehow the lack of this important distinction was no problem for the
Italic-speakers, the Greeks, the early Celts or the Indo-Iranians, all
of whom spoke languages with a fully preserved three-gender system. The
*-om of thematic neuters _is_ anomalous, given the consistently
endingless form of athematic neuters and the pronominal *-o-d. However,
whatever its true prehistory, it isn't likely to have developed directly
from an endingless noun stem, since the thematic vowel, when exposed in
final position would have had the e-timbre, as in the vocative. There is
no sufficient comparative ground for the reconstruction of *-o as a
variant of *-om already in PIE. I doubt if the ancestor of Slavic could
have generalised the pattern of neuter stems in *-i and *-u, since both
types had been completely eliminated by proto-Slavic times and their
members were either shifted to the masculine gender (*medHu [n.] -->
*medU [m.] 'honey, mead') or converted into productive declensional
types (*mori --> *mori-o- > *morje 'sea').
See also
http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/cybalist/ message/31827and the discussion that followed.
Piotr
__________________
What you say makes sense and sounds right. But there is a small question which I have with the pronominal-import theory: if *-os and *-om of the masc. nom. and acc. sg. should become *-U (unstressed *o before consonants), why would *o remain /o/ before *d -- why wouldn't it also become *-U? I can understand that a following nasal might raise /o/ to /u/, but why should following *-s raise /o/ to /u/? It is an apical occlusive like /d/, so why should it affect /o/ any
differently? In Latin *-od became /ud/ just like *-os became /us/, as in the pronouns <aliud> , <illud>, and <istud>. If you say that the masculines developed *-U entirely from the accusative singular, whereas the masculine nominative singular *-os would have produced *-o like *-od, then why didn't neuters also develop *-U, and simply merge with the masculines like *medU did? Perhaps it has to do with *-od possibly being stressed, and *-os being unstressed, for the divergent vowel development (although wasn't *-os sometimes stressed as well?). Or is stressed vs. unstressed *-om another possible source for the distinction between *-U and *-o? I think that paper rejected this idea, but I forget why at the moment.
I haven't yet read your suggested link, so maybe what I mention above has already been discussed there.
Andrew.___
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