Differentiation

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

In response to a thread woven by Patrick C. Ryan

Dear Pat,

In some recent postings you have suggested that some IE mrophological
forms, indeed categories, have arisen "by differentiation". I have spoken
out against it, and you have asked me why.

You wrote you would have to consider a form like 2pl *bhe'rete "quite a
bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms", i.e. younger than
*bhe'ret (which lives on as the 3sg). The point was that you wanted vowels
to be predictable from the consonant skeleton, so you set the basic ablaut
rule that deletes all unstressed short vowels in action. Actually, that
should not allow *bhe'ret either, but only *bhe'rt, but no matter, let's
take to have been the form, just for the sake of the argument.

My objection is that if in such a language vowels only exist accented,
there would be no variants containing unstressed vowels, and thus there
would be no material the language could differentiate. When languages make
arbitrary differentiations, they utilize existing patterns, but *bhe'rete
could simply not exist in a language on which the fundamental ablaut rule
had worked. Therefore either the rule or the idea of differentiation is
wrong.

In fact, if grammatical number is something IE has in common with the
other members of the presumed Nostratic macrofamily, it does not seem very
likely that it would be an IE innovation, does it? To my eyes, it even
looks as if the 1st and 2nd plural forms of the IE verb have the same
conglomerate endings as in Uralic. I therefore do not believe they have
arisen by a preocess of secondary differentiation which looks illogical to
me in the first place.

Jens