Knut:

>Glens explanation for the thematic wovels in verbs, I think make a
>lot of sense.

Yes, everything is working to plan. Now that I have converted Knut,
I shall make my move to take over the entire world... HAHAHAHA!

>As far as I know, definite ajectives in Germanic, is marked by an
>en/on-exstention of the stem, not e/o.

However this is not reconstructed for ProtoGermanic itself, is it?
I certainly know from the hours of sitting on my gramma's knee that
some Germanic languages like the Swedish she spoke to me has markers
for definiteness... but in ProtoGermanic itself? I thought this
developed later than the PGerm. stage.


Knut goes to work chopping down our "thematic noun" ideas:

>-In indoeuropean as it usually is reconstructed, the thematic
>declention is very important, and it serves several purposes. It
>also seem to be an strong connection between thematic stems (denoting
>masculine gender) and a-stems (denoting feminine gender), where the a-stems
>simply is a thematic stem furnished
>with a laryngeal suffixe.

Yes, the feminines ending in *-ax (*-aH2) are nothing more than a
thematized version of *-x, the collective marker seen in inanimate
nouns such as *wed�:r "water(s)" (< *wed�r-x) and *-k^ont-x "tens".

The original IndoEuropean gender system, as testified by Anatolian,
shows an original animate/inanimate contrast. In IndoEuropean,
thematic roots are most often used as animates, and nouns are
often thematized in various ways to convert them from inanimate
to animate. So it's fitting that a "thematic collective" came to
be used for the feminine as a kind of morphological hybrid
between "animate" (=> "masculine") and "inanimate" (=> "neuter")
genders. However, since the feminine gender is not even
reconstructable to the earliest reconstructed stages of
IndoEuropean (that is, the "IndoAnatolian" stage), this point fails
to be relevant to the origins of thematic stems.

>-Both explanations does it neccessary to asume a very rapid
>development of the thematic declention with all its features and
>connections.

Hardly "rapid". I offer a span of a 1,000 years for its development
(between 5000 and 4000 BCE). How slow do you want this to be? ;)
I don't think you're looking at the whole picture.

First, it's worth noting that genitival adjectives were doubling
as nouns. Adjectival declension is hardly different from
nominal declension (Note Sanskrit's continued confusion with
adjectives and nouns or Latin's use of "bella" as both a noun
AND adjective).

Many roots in IE are transparently recent constructs and few appear
to be inherited from an earlier stage. The general view on
your example of *wlkWos "wolf" appears to be that it is an
acrostatic noun derived from a descriptive adjective
**wlkW�s. The fact is that genitival adjectives appear to have been
a highly productive way of forming new words in recent IE times.

Don't believe me? Try counting the staggering amount of English
words ending in /-tion/ as an entirely parallel and
language-altering development that has happened in the last
thousand years within the history of English. Like *-o-s, /-tion/
is a highly productive suffix that forms everything from
/construction/ to /abortion/... and it's even a FOREIGN suffix,
taken from Latin!

I fail to see how what I'm saying is unlikely. I think it's
very possible.

>As far as I have understood, many (perhaps all?) Steppe-nouns had
>roots ending in wovels, conformant with wovel root endings in Uralic
>and Altaic.

Maybe, maybe not. Uralic tells us nothing because, from what I
see, it has developed into a more syllabic language, having
_added_ vowels after most consonant-final words (aside from
words with final *-n). One is hard-pressed to find any
consonant-final stems in Uralic at all! They do exist,
particularly amongst pronominal stems, but very rare. This is
why I think that Uralic tended towards a more syllabic state.

I think that Altaic and IndoTyrrhenian are more conservative here.
Thankfully, the nature of the IE accent proves that at some
point in the past (5500-5000 BCE to be precise), IndoEuropean
had lost unstressed vowels due to heavy stress, including all
final vowels as well. Stems with final accent in IE indicate
an original final vowel in Mid IE because this stage had a
_regular_ accent on the penultimate syllable.

Eg: *wodr < MIE *w�t:en "water"
*k^wo:n < *k^won-s < MIE *kew�ne "dog"
*k^un�s < MIE *kewen�se "of the dog"

Of course, all my thoughts on early IE stages including the PA
Rule, Vocalic Constraint Theory, and Velar Allophony (a uvular
explanation for satemisation) are already presented in-depth at:

http://glen_gordon.tripod.com/LANGUAGE/NOSTRATIC/STEPPE/indoeuropean.html

At any rate, because of the Penultimate Accent Rule, I cannot
see how IE's thematic stems can be seriously traced back to any
earlier than the Mid IE stage. Thematic stems don't even show
original accent like athematic stems, having a recently regularized
initial accent called "acrostatic".


- love gLeN


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