--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "pielewe" <wrvermeer@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jens Elmegård Rasmussen <elme@>
> wrote:
>
> On the Novgorod msc o-stem Nsg in -e:
>
> >
> > But you *have* whetted our appetite, and you can spare us a whole
> lot
> > of searching if you would be kind enough to paraphrase the main
> point
> > of your theory here. Is it graphic?
> >
>
> The trouble is that it is a long and (worse) somewhat paradoxical
> story. But what is really bad is that it is based on Leskien's
> hypothesis that the phonetically regular reflex of word-final PIE *os
> in Slavic is *o, which is not exactly a view with much support among
> Cybalist members, despite its clear prevalence among specialists
> (Hujer, Vondrák, van Wijk, Berns^tejn, Mares^, Shevelov, Stieber,
> Kortlandt, and many others).
>
> So if you bear with me in the matter of the reflex of word-final *os
> (for the sake of the argument), here we go.
>
It seems to me you can get your *-o from *-om. It goes like this:
I've argued once that PIE acc. -m joined with the preceding vowel
to form a nasal consonant, since the only attestations of actual
-m is from Indo-Iranian (but acc. -m there is known to nasalize),
and Latin (and do.).
I learned from a phrase book of Polish I got through the first 25
pages of that its nasal vowels seem to fall apart into corresponding
non-nasal vowel plus (homorganic) consonant before some consonants,
s-, t-, I think I remember. Now if nasal vowels are that instable
(the linguistic equivalents of mayonnaise), there must necessarily
have existed, Schmalstieg-style, two sandhi variants for
m.acc.,m.n.nom.acc. *-õ (traditionally *-om),
namely 1) *-õ and 2) *-on (*-om etc). They became
1) *-õ -> *-u~ -> -U , and
2) *-on -> -o
This would give a picture of confusion to learners, but if
*-os -> -U, the forms with -o would be in majority in the neuter
(since they came from both nom. and acc.), from which people
might have take the clue to generalize -o in the neuter and
-U in the masculine, introducing in the process into the masc.
o-declension the Fennic fashion of marking the object by
either the nominative or the ablative form.
Torsten