Re: s-stems in Slavic and Germanic

On 2009-02-05 22:33, Andrew Jarrette wrote:

> By the way, I thought that the OHG representative of the IE o-stem
> plural, i.e. <-a:>, was the regular outcome of PGmc *-ôz < PIE *-ôs,

More likely acc.pl. *-anz > *-a~ > -a(:), used for the nom.pl.

> while OE <-as> and OS <-os> represented the outcome of a PIE *-ôses,
> which occurs sometimes as Vedic <-a:sas>. In any case I've never
> heard of any stage of German having auslaut <-s> in the nominative or
> accusative plural of IE o-stems.

_All_ Germanic strong masculine plurals (except that seen in OHG) can be
derived from *-o:ziz ~ *-o:siz < *-o:s-es without any serious difficulties.

Piotr