Re: Mak

> Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, p. 482, thinks macte
> may be a verbal adjective *mag-to-, parallel to *mag-no- (in
> magnus). On the other hand, I think that this is an old 3sg perf.
> pass. in the original impersonal sense: "There has been mak'd!",
> whatever *mak- means?
> In the following, I will assume that IE *pa- = IE *ma- = IE *ba-.
> This is of course unusual, I think Piotr would call it; I'll defend
> it by saying that this not really IE, it's pre-IE, because:
> 1) vocalisme a, mot populaire
> 2) there's a nice pre-IE fit for it in Latin baculum, Basque makilla
> "staff", Latin pax "peace", Christian Latin pax "kiss" (ie.
> "blessing") and *some* of the jumble in
> http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/HbHpHg.html
> http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/KuhnText/08pauk-stechen.html
> which would make the blessed macula, Palmer's hypothetical *max, in
> reality pax, the result of being hit with a staff?
>
> Benveniste notes that the denominative verb is originally used as
> mactare deum extis, ie exalt the god by means of sacrifices. Noting
> that the two non-derivative forms of the word that are known are
> mactus and macte, I propose that the Germanic preterito-presentic
> modal verb Germ mag, mochte is from *(mi-k) mak, *(mi-s?) mak-to,
> lit. me a blessing(permission), (to-)me a
> blessing(permission)-there-was.
> Further, I suspect the same is the case for all preterito-presentic
> Germanic verbs: the present is a noun (or adjective inflected for
> person), the preterite is a t-adjective (t-adjectives are not
> essentially ppp's, they just work there). Eg shall/soll etc with
> only nominal IE cognates and a proposed Vasconic cognate (Vennemann:
> Solduri "sworn brotherhood among the Aquitani"), eg. *(mi-k) skol,
> (mi-s sk.l-tó, lit. (me) debt/guilt, (to-me) debt/guilt-there-was.
>
> So, Latin mac-te is "a blessing(permission-to-go-ahead) has happened
> (to you)". The esto of macte esto marks a step on the way from
> macte > macte est > mactus est, the latter being a normal 3sg perf
> pass of a verb *mac- if such a verb had existed.
>
> Hope I'm making somewhat sense.

BTW, I was wondering if the original 3sg.perf.impersonal in *-to was identical to the future imp.(?) in *-to, cf.
Russian 'dos^li!' "let's go!", lit. "(we) left"
Da. 'vi er gået!' "let's go", lit. "we have left"
Germ. 'stillgestanden!' "halt!", lit. "stood still" (ppp)

It would certainly make sense with macte! "let here be mak!", ie. "get on with it!". I think PIE had *kt- -> *-xt- (suitably generalized), Latin among others generalized most ppp's back to -kt-, in the case of maxte!, there were no forms outside ppp/3sg.perf.impers/future imperative to generalize from, so it -> ma:te! -> mate!, now understood as a subjunctive for a verb back-formed as matar, which answers Rick's old question why that verb wasn't palatalized in Spanish like hecho was.


Torsten