Slavic *-je/o

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Here's another take:
The *-je/o- extension appears just before the endings. It is a
type of thematic ending.
Suppose (Schmalstieg) the original verbal (mi-)inflection was
the semithematic one, ie the one where those endings that have
-o- in the thematic inflection (before voiced) are there and
those that have -e- in the thematic (before unvoiced) aren't
there. Such a version of a verb with the *-jo-/je- suffix
would look like *-jo-/-i- instead. Suppose further that the
thematic inflection was produced from the semithematic one by
placing -e-'s before the unvoiced endings. We'd now have
*-jó-/-íe-, it being so late that the latter (corresponding
to your *-ih-) didn't go -> *-jé-, and therefore later could
go to Slavic *i, like *ei and *i: did.


Torsten