On 2006-08-30 12:51, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:
>> [Torsten:] On the other hand, if everybody else uses special
>> pleading, why shouldn't I? I believe you also appealed to special
>> circumstances with *-eje/o in Slavic?
>
> Guilty as charged. The behaviour of *-éje- in Balto-Slavic is hard to
> understand, but at least this seems to be an inner problem of that
> group of languages. I haven't given it much thought yet in the light
> of my new proposal concerning the origin of the causative/iterative.
> I'll try to do so at my leisure and I'll report the conclusions, if
> any.
All right, I'm back. The central problems are as follow:
(1) The completely divergent development of the present-tense *-éje- in
Baltic (*-a~-) and Slavic (*-i~-).
(2) The puzzling infinitive, _the same_ in both subbranches (Slavic
*-i"ti-, Lith. -ýti, both acuted, as if from *-ih-téi).
To account for (1), we have to assume contraction in the
iterative/causative suffix. The 1sg. ending *-joN in Slavic derives more
or less regularly from *-ejo- > *-ijo- > *-jo-, perhaps generalising an
"anti-Sieversian" simplification of the sequence after light syllables.
The *-i:- from *-eje- may be a regular development word-internally
(despite *trIje, *gostIje with *-Ije- < *-ije(h) < *-ej-es).
For Baltic, the contraction of *-ejo- (with the *-o- variant of the
thematic vowel generalised, as is normal in East Baltic) > *-eja- >
*-ea- > *-a~- is not fully regular, but looks natural enough, especially
in a grammatical morpheme.
The infinitive is a hard nut to crack. For Slavic, we could claim the
combined influence of the present-tense *-i- and the *-a- and *-e^-
infinitives, but no such solution will work for Baltic. Perhaps we
should ask, in the first place, what kind of infinitive should be
_expected_ in Balto-Slavic. If the PIE verbal adjective of the *-éje-
type ended in *-i-tó- (where, I submit, the unaccented *i corresponds to
the accented *-é- of *-é-je-, not to the glide that follows), we could
also expect verbal nouns in *-i-ti-, *-i-tu- (cf. Lat. domitus, -u:s
'taming' < *domh2-i-tu-), and from the dative of the former a BSl.
infinitive in *-i-téi, irrespective of the result of the contraction in
the present stem. This would have been the only type of infinitive
derived from a stem ending in a short vowel, so _now_ the influence of
verbs in *-ah2- (> *-a:-) and *-eh1- (> *-e:-) begins to make some
sense. In the old layer of iteratives with (Balto-)Slavic vr.ddhi high
vowels become acuted if lengthened (the *sy"pati type), so we don't even
have to postulate the insertion of a laryngeal in *-i-téi; plain
analogical lengthening will do, yielding *-i:-téi with the right
accentual behaviour. If I'm wrong about this, I hope our resident
experts on Slavic will correct me.
Piotr