Re: Compensatory lengthening

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

>
> On 2006-09-14 18:49, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> >> The actual form of the nom.sg. was *po:ds, phonetically *[po:ts],
> >> and simplifications of the final cluster are branch-specific
> >> (cf. Skt. pa:t with regular t < *ts).
> >
> > Or maybe it was an athematic ablative.
>
> I'm afraid I don't follow. Why should the Skt. nominative be an
> ablative, of all things?

In the sense of a partitive. Note that the Skr. (thematic) ablative
ends in -t. Now "of foot" is not a good substitute for "foot",
but pa:t is more recognizable than *pa .

> >> The length isn't compensatory, or to be more
> >> precise it doesn't compensate for a lost segment.
> >
> > As I said, and I don't like it.
> >
> >
> >> The nom.sg. *-s (but not just any *-s!)
> >
> > And I don't like that either.
>
> Sorry, but it happens to be that way.

Maybe reasons appear later in the posting.

> >> lengthens vowels in the final syllables of
> >> consonantal stems irrespective of whether it stays or goes (as in
> >> *p&2té:r, etc.). It was lost after *r, *n, *s and *j (probably also
> >> after *m and *l), but not e.g. in *wo:kW-s, *k^lo:p-s, *népo:t-s or
> >> *dié:u-s, where we find length nevertheless. Jens's hypothesis is

that

> >> the nom.sg. ending was originally voiced *-z rather than *-s, and

that

> >> the difference has something to do with the phonetic lengthening
> >> (phonemicised upon the merger of *-z with *-s).
> >
> > How about instead, as I proposed, an exceptionless phonetic rule and
> > sporadic restauration of stem auslaut and/or nom. -s?
>

> It isn't sporadic. The *-s appears in well-defined phonetic
> environments. The distribution makes sense if we assume conditioned
> loss, but hardly so if we assume wholesale loss with selective
> restoration. Why should *-s have been analogically restored
> after *-w but not after *-j, for example?

Nothing unites those phonemes phonetically, true, so your argument
is equally applicable to the classical theory.

>Why wasn't it restored after nasals?
> There was no phonotactic prohibition against *-Vns# or *-Vis# in PIE.
> And most importantly -- if *-s was lost without exception, what's its
> restoration supposed to have been analogical to?

There's a few details I left out here:
Since I think the mi-conjugation was originally some non-finite
form, like a verbal noun or a participle, that form must have
had subject and object in some form of genetive, ie PPIE *-as
and *-am. But that means there must have existed some "old
nominative", endingless as in Finnish. (That's the reason for my
interest in the Novgorod nominative in *-e) Now it was *that*
endingless case I imagined lost all consonants in auslaut.
Later, when the mi-conjugation was beginning to be understood
as a finite form people wanted to distinguish between the former
subjective genitive and a "proper" genitive and did so by moving
stress in the latter to the ending (*-ós), the former on the
other hand developed such final clusters by contraction that
people instead slapped the case mark -s on the 'old nominative'.

> >> The o-colour of the
> >> thematic vowel in the nom.sg. *-o-s is also ascribed to the original
> >> voicing of *-z.
> >
> > As I recounted some massages back, and proposed that nom. was not
> > *-oz, but *-oNs.
>
> I don't understand your proposal, or the motivation behind it.

I can understand PPIE *-ans -> *-ãs -> *-õs -> PIE -os, but can't
understand PPIE *-az -> PIE *-os. I don't think it makes sense
phonetically. The point of the modification is to make *o appear
before resonants, not voiced.

> > Yes, all that is the standard theory. What do you think of my
> > proposal?
>
> The idea that, e.g. *wo:kWs comes from *wo: with the *kW and the *s
> restored by analogy? I think I like it less than the standard account.
>

Now it's
nominative *wo:,
subjective genitive *wokWs,
proper genitive *wokWós


Torsten