Yet again: syllabicity

Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen jer at cphling.dk
Thu Jun 10 01:31:37 UTC 1999


On Sun, 6 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

[... (In discussion with Leo Connolly, Pat suggests that *bhe'rete has
retained two unstressed e's because the time of deletion was over.)]

> Leo queried:

>> But then, what happened to the expected *_bhr.te'_ from the period while the
>> rule still operated?  [...]

> Pat attempts an answer:

> The only answer I can offer is that I believe all plural forms originated
> quite a bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms.

I, Jens, intrude: But secondarily created forms ought to be even more
transparent than older forms. And it is a point in your reasoning that the
material utilized to differentiate *bhe'ret and *bhe'rete (and **bhe'rt
which does not appear to exist) was not distinctive. How, then, could it
be available?

[...]

> A possibility for a verbal inflection at this very early stage may be what
> Beekes, among others, characterizes as simply *-e as found in the third
> person singulars of the present/aorist thematic and the perfect; the method
> of differentiation being --- at least of one stage --- simply the Ablaut of
> the stem vowel: perfect *bho{'}re vs. present/aorist *bhe{'}re.  I also
> speculate that IE was a mixed system, so that the ergative construction
> showed up in a perfective context; the patient agreement marker being *-0;
> while in an imperfective context, the *effective* agent agreement marker was
> *-y (for Beekes simple *-e).

> This situation, in turn, grew out of a pre-Ablaut more consistently ergative
> system in which only two verbal forms existed: a passive perfective:
> *bhere{'} (*bher- + *-He, patient marker) and a passive imperfective
> *bherey (*bher- + *-He, patient marker + *-y, imperfective marker), which
> would be almost exactly the situation I see for Sumerian.

Have you any examples of a language just "differentiating" by using what
must have been, up till then, non-existing phantom-variants which were
suddenly invented without any model? Though often heard in attempts to
explain morphological systems - no, you are not alone - this just appears
impossible.

And why would an older stage of the language be as in Sumerian? What if
the Indo-Europeans really _meant_ what they said and intended the system
to be the way we find it? Then we could have almost exactly the situation
I see for Indo-European. That would be an even closer parallel - by what
rule is it inferior?

Jens



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