Res: [tied] Re: s-stems in Slavic and Germanic

--- In cybalist@... s.com, "Joao S. Lopes" <josimo70@.. .> wrote:
>
> I was wondering if such s-stem words could be derived from PIE, or
be just innovations or s-extensions. There's a bunch of matches that
seem to be IE-widespread, like *nebHos (Greek nephos=Hit napash=Skt
nabhas=Slav nebo) and *g^en(h?)os (genos=genus= janas). Greek has a
long listmof words including abstract nouns (takhos, me:kos, brakhos),
animal names (ke:tos "sea monster", te:thos "oyster", selakhos
"shark", temakhos "fish sliced"), natural phenomena (skotos, khaos,
nephos).
> The examples of genos and menos were the simplest constructions:
nouns derived from verbal roots with s-suffix (gen(h)-os, men-os), but
in another examples the suffixation seems to be more hard to explain.
Temakhos seems obviously derived from *temh-" to cut, but with an
ending that not seems regular in Greek (kh<h?)
>
> Latin is also full of such names (genus, munus, foedus, scelus,
etc), but I don't know about Celtic examples, probably they existed too.
> JS Lopes

I've been wondering whether s-stems were actually old genitives taken
as stems. Mordvin does something similar (ie. take a case form as a
new noun stem). If PIE nominative -s originally belonged to the
thematic stem paradigm, athematic nouns might once have had an
endingless nominative like an accusative language should, and use of
nominative vs. genitive (in the partitive sense) might have been
vacillating, leading to said new genitive-based stem.

Torsten