Knut, then Miguel:

>>Does enyone on this board have a view about the origin of IE thematic
>>wovels?
>
>Yes: they are the agglutinated anaphoric pronoun *e/*o.

Oh, that's right. Miguel has views too >;)

Unfortunately, his views don't make much sense because there is
no reason for a 3ps pronoun to be attached to the verb unless this
was a way of marking transitivity. (The 3ps pronoun would function
as an object marker in this case.) There is nothing wrong with this
idea but, as I've stated, the original function of the *[-m, -s]
set of endings was _already_ marking transitivity during the
IndoTyrrhenian stage, and this assertion is backed up by its
correlation with the special objective conjugation seen in Uralic
and Yukaghir.

Since there is no such thing as an intransitive **bher-t without
a supposedly transitive marker **-e- to prove Miguel's case, I'm
not sure how he can logically justify this view. The only forms
similar to this is the past tense *e-bher-t (which semantically
doesn't fit) and the aorist *bher-s-t (which also doesn't make
sense and is complicated by the extra *-s- suffix).

Further, since this is a Nostratic list afterall, what Miguel
offers fails to illuminate on any noteworthy connections outside
of IndoEuropean. My view helps to build on the connections already
seen between IndoEuropean, on the one hand, and Uralic & Altaic
on the other... so you be the judge.

>>With that I mean the ending of the stem in the thematic declination
>>o/e declension of nouns, and the wovel between root and ending in
>>forms of many verbs (present/imperfect tense, some aorists).
>
>In the nouns, the thematic vowel served to make originally definite
>adjectives (later often substantivized).

Again, it would be nice to see any sort of hint at an original
opposition between "definite" adjectives versus "indefinite" ones
in IndoEuropean. Instead, there is no such opposition anywhere
within the corpus of IE studies. Miguel's dreaming again.

While there is absolutely no trace of such a definite/indefinite
opposition, we know that adjectives can agree with nouns, we know
that adjectives are often formed from genitives in many languages,
and we know that the IE genitive *-os can easily be mistaken for
the animate nominative in *-s. We even know that the thematic nouns
are mostly animate. Everything fits.

- love gLeN


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