--- In nostratic@..., "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:

>
>
> Yes, I still find it hard to believe. I think 1000 years simply is

not long enough for such an small thing to develope into such a big
feature.

The problem is not that it is impossible for some ajectives to be
reinterpreted as nouns and then the genitive of these to be
reinterpreted as nominatives, with the -o- of the genitive ending
interpreted as a stem terminal. I know that in many languages the
distinction between ajectivs and nouns are very faint, or
nonexisting. Two example of this are Italian and Finnish, two
languages I myself have taken the effort to learn.

The problem is the development of logical function, and in this case
several functions. Before such a feature could spread, this terminal -
o-needs time to develope logical meanings, and grammatical functions.

You also wrote

> 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 *wát:en "water"
> *k^wo:n < *k^won-s < MIE *kewáne "dog"
> *k^unós < MIE *kewenáse "of the dog"
>
>

Yes, I agree that this prosess has taken place in the way you
describe, for very many nouns. Since I do not have any clear meaning
of when this took place, I cannot argue against your proposal for the
time period.

But, had neccessarily all words a penultimate stress? If not, the
process would have given another result for nouns having another type
of stress, and would effectively produse another type of declention
for those nouns.

My basic Idea is simply that not all nouns had penultimate stress
during this period. For some nouns the stress pattern protected the
second wovel of the root, and this protected wovel developed into the
thematic wovel.

I propose this, simply because I do not find the conventional
explanations (of which there are at least two) for the thematic
conjugations good enough.






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