--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
> >
> > The following is yet another of Torsten's horribly long postings.
> > I'm afraid I can't do it any other way, the correspondences are
> > not point-to-point semantic matches, but field-to-field, so to
> > speak, I discovered that some old root *san,W- "public verdict"
> > seems to lie behind Northern IE and Jeniseian and perhaps Uralic
> > perception of what is right and true.
Mighty Torsten roams the land, the cybalisters cower in their holes... Where's everybody? Every time I post something interesting, a deadly silence falls on cybalist for several days. Anyway, to business:
Normally, since we assume reasoning in general goes from the concrete to the abstract, we assume similarly in historical linguistics that in the cases where a particular word has both a concrete and an abstract sense that the concrete sense was the first, ie original one.
That's not justified generally. The verb *sekW- is assumed to have two original senses, both concrete, "follow" and "see". But an abstract sense unites them, something like "investigate", discovering the truth about a particular matter.
Latin sequitur could thus be understood both as "it follows (that)" and "it is seen (that)".
The deponent verb sequor "follows" now suddenly makes sense as a passive of the PIE verbal stem *sekW-, or rather as an impersonal (which was the original function of the 3rd sg. passive) "one sees that".
If we also assume that formally pronouncing that truth one found was part of the same act designated by the verb, then even within Latin sequor matches up perfectly with the other, non-deponent forms of *sekW- in Latin: *én-sekWàm -> inquam "I say", *én-sekWèt -> inquit "he says" to make up a full active/passive paradigm for the verb in Latin).
(The senses are usually quoted as "I'd say" and "he'd say", ie. as subjunctives, but I think that since thematic stems are known to come from subjunctives, ie. subjunctives were characterized by being thematic, that characteristic feature must have arisen from the fact that subjunctives occur only in subordinate clauses, and in subordinate clauses adverbs which are free in main clauses merge with the verb, thus creating a stress pattern préfx-stem-ènd-i, as opposed to main clause stém-end-ì, and then unstressed syllables were lost (and sometimes analogically restored) which is why verbs in subordinate clauses have thematic vowels and secondary endings and those in main clauses have (rather: had) no thematic endings and primary endings).
Torsten