On 2006-11-12 00:01, Richard Wordingham wrote:
> Why can't the pronoun have meant '(he) who am speaking'? (I know that
> such agreement is not grammatical in modern English, but I believe it
> can be found in Latin.) It would naturally be ground down quite a
> bit, so it could easily have lost a relative pronoun.
As far as I can see, the original present corresponding to the aorist
root *h1eg^- was *&1g^-jé/ó- (if Lat. aio is anything to go by). Unless
the pronoun is of a relatively recent (post-PIE) origin, I should prefer
the analysis of *h1ég^-e/o- as an aorist subjunctive. But of course in
the "crown clade" containing the extant IE languages such subjunctives
have been shifted to the "progressive" category on a massive scale, and
since Anatolian and Tocharian have 1sg. forms that don't match the "ego"
pronoun, a late origin of the latter cannot be ruled out.
Piotr