On 2006-09-13 17:00, pielewe wrote:
> In the absence of serious parallels I can't accept the possibility
> that formally neuter nouns could spontaneously lose their entire
> inflection merely on the basis of the Vsg. Since the paradigm without
> declension is anomalous, it has to be archaic. The renewed completion
> of the indeclinable paradigms is a trivial innovation.
You are, however, prepared to accept the possibility that a whole
anomalous, inflectionless paradigm arose on the basis of a single form
-- the old nom.sg. Why should that have happened? The answer,
presumably, is that after the morphological substitution of *-U for *-o
in the nom.sg. of masculine appellatives the archaic *-o surviving in
personal names no longer made sense as part a recognisable masculine
paradigm.
So far so good, but does it make any difference if we hypothesise that
the *-o was originally a neuter ending? The o-names were semantically
masculine, so once they came to be treated as such also in terms of
grammatical agreement, their *-o was felt to be just as aberrant as in
your hypothesis. If that was a sufficient reason for its generalisation,
it should be regarded as equally sufficient in the other scenario.
I don't want to fly off at a tangent into side discussions. The question
was if the -o could imaginably be something else than a reflex of *-os.
I submit that it could be taken at face value as the neuter
nom./acc./voc.sg. *-o shifted over to the masculine gender (semantics
overruling morphology).
By the way, in which Slavic languages is this indeclinable anthroponymic
-o attested? I can't find any reliable information about its distribution.
Best regards,
Piotr