From: dgkilday57
Message: 63605
Date: 2009-03-16
>P-Italic has a distinct impersonal, Umbrian <ferar> 'one must bear', etc. In Q-Italic this impersonal has been replaced by the 3sg. pass., "precario itur" etc., but that is not the latter's original function. Also, note that Lat. <secundus>, OL <sequondos>, means '(connected with) following', hence 'second'. The sense 'follow' is not specific to the mediopassive usage of the root.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Latin sequitur could thus be understood both as "it follows (that)" and "it is seen (that)".
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> 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).Actually, *en-sekW- is reflected in the Latin imperative <insece>, used by Livius Andronicus to render its Greek cognate <ennepe> (Andra moi ennepe, mousa, polutropon ktl., Od. 1:1), and <inquam> comes from a distinct root.
> (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).Are you talking about PIE or Proto-Italic or what? In Italic the optative has fallen together with the subjunctive, and we have plenty of examples of the independent subjunctive.