From: tgpedersen
Message: 49405
Date: 2007-07-19
> There's an idea I've been toying with for a long time, andAnd here's another 'Weinberg adjective', if Piotr is right in assuming
> perhaps the time is ripe for sharing it here. The late Polish
> linguist Adam Weinberg once suggested, as an obiter dictum in a
> handbook of IE morphology, that there may have been an early form of
> "perfect participle" -- a verbal adjective based on the bare
> reduplicated stem without any suffixes. His original examples are
> just two: Hitt. memal 'groats' < substantivised *mé-ml.h2 (or
> *mé-mo:l?) 'that has been ground', , and Lat. memor 'mindful, that
> reminds one (of sth.)'; Weinberg connects the latter with *(s)mer-
> 'remember'. I wouldn't however exclude the analysis of <memor> as
> *mé-mr. (a variant of *mé-m(o)n- with final rhotacism), connecting
> it directly with the root *men- and <memini:> (and Gk. Memn-o:n, for
> example). Of course I'm aware of the "handbook" etymology of <memor>
> as *me-mn-us-, but how about something more straightforward?
>
> My own addition to Weinberg's idea is the guess that the inanimate
> variant of the adjective originally had a passive meaning while the
> animate one was active, and that the perfect itself is a denominal
> formation based on this "participle" (cf. the Slavic l-preterite).
>
> Other examples could be proposed, especially of lexicalised
> substantivisations, e.g. *dHe-dH(h1)- '(coagulated) milk' (from
> *dHeh1i-), perhaps *me-ms- 'meat' (speculatively, from
> *meh1-/*met-/*mes- 'cut into portions' [--> 'mete out, measure'],
> cf. Skt. masti- 'measuring'). This would open the way for analysing
> reduplicated nouns such as *kWe-kWl[h1]-o- as derivatives of
> "Weinberg adjectives". The classic perfect participle in *-wot-/-us-
> could itself be regarded as one of such secondary formations.