Re: What is a "regular (endocentric) thematicization"?

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 2:35 PM, r_brunner <rbrunner@...> wrote:

 

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Bhrihskwobhloukstroy <bhrihstlobhrouzghdhroy@...> wrote:
>
> 2013/8/18, r_brunner <rbrunner@...>:
> > The Wiktionary entry at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/war#Tocharian_B for
> > the Tocharian B word for "water" gives a PIE form *udrom as the probable
> > origin for this and states that *udrom is a "regular (endocentric)
> > thematicization".
> >
> > I could not find out what this means. Does this say that already in PIE
> > there might have been a special form *udrom of the "water" word and say
> > something how that form might have developed?
>
> 'Thematicization' means that a thematic vowel *-o- is added to a
> consonantal stem, in this case *udr-. 'Endocentric' has two meanings:
> 1) in derivational morphology, it's a derivation without suffixes and,
> precisely, based on the weak stem (= stem of the Genitive case) of the
> basic word, in this case *udr- (Nominative *wed-Å r, Genitive *ud-r-os,
> stem *ud-r- + ending *-os);
> 2) in thematicizations and compositional morphology, an endocentric
> derivation keeps the same referent of the basic word, while an
> exocentric one gets possessive meaning (e.g. *'udro-, with root
> accent, should mean 'water', while *udr-'o-, with suffixal accent,
> should mean 'having water').
>
> In this case both meanings of 'endocentric' seem to have been
> conflated together, since *udr-o- is both base on weak stem *ud-r- and
> provided with the same referent 'water'
>
> >
> > I traced the info back to the entry for "war" in "A Dictionary of Tocharian
> > B" by Douglas Q. Adams, so it's probably reasonably up-to-date, but that
> > entry does not include more explanation concerning this.
> >
> > And what is *udrom in the root-suffix-ending scheme? *ud-r-om? With what
> > roles for suffix "r" and ending "om"?
> >
> zero grade for both root (*ud-) and suffix (*-r-) implies a basic
> word with a hysterokinetic or amphikinetic paradigm (hysterokinetic =
> strong stems with zero-grade root, accented full or lengthened suffix
> and zero ending, weak stems with zero grado root and suffix and
> accented full-grade endings; amphikinetic = strong stems with
> full-grade accented root, zero-grade suffix, and lengthened ending,
> weak stems with zero grado root and suffix and accented full-grade
> endings, although in strong stems the lengthened grade can affect the
> suffix instead of the ending);
> the ending *-o-m exhibits thematic vowel, in the thought of our
> most regretted Jens a sort of postponed article, with the marker of
> non-animate gender in direct cases
>

Thanks for this extensive information!

The more I learn about PIE the more I am amazed about the PIE root-suffix-ending word formation scheme. I have some difficulty to really grasp that a language could form words in such a highly systematic way.

Were linguists surprised when they had finally puzzled this together, or are there precedents? Are there other - current, living - languages that have a similar system of word formation?