asi, ahi, ei~

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
>
>
> Melchert in "Hittite h_i-Verbs from Adverbs"
> http://www.unc.edu/~melchert/krakow.pdf
> concludes that the Hittite h_i-verb stems *a:ppai-, *p(a)ra:- and
> *s^anna- are derived directly from eponymous adverbs, ie. the h_i
> conjugation endings are suffixed directly to the adverb. By some
> strange coincidence those adverbs, cognates of Latin sub, super, sine,
> are the only non-verbs (apart from a number of mainly Germanic nouns)
> to occur with s-mobile. This seems to indicate that the place in the
> sentence where they incurred that s-mobile was that of the verb, and
> nowhere else.

Now if the verb stem can be replaced by an adverb, that means the verb
stem itself was a kind of gerund, ie syntactically an adverb (which I
keep claiming, with the finite forms of the mi-conjugation being
'deictified' gerunds). That opens a possibility to solve the old
puzzle of why the 2sg pres. ind. of *h1es- "be" has only one -s- (Skt
ási, Av. ahi, Gk. ei~), namely that the stem of that verb was actually
the adverb/preverb *h1e- "done, finished" (also known as the augment),
so that the 'paradigm was originally
*h1e-mi "there is (done, finished) at me"
*h1e-si "there is (done, finished) at thee"
*h1e-ti "there is (done, finished) at him"

and that a false stem *es- spread from the 2sg
*h1es-mi
*h1e-si
*h1es-ti


Torsten