Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

Carol F. Justus cjustus at mail.utexas.edu
Thu Jun 17 17:16:58 UTC 1999


[ moderator re-formatted ]

Dear Jens,

Thank you for your detailed comments. The issues are those on which there
has traditionally been a lot of disagreement and probably will be, perhaps
as much because of differing research goals as anything. For me
crosslinguistic definitions of categories are important for the explicit
criteria they offer for re-evaluating received wisdom. Obviously, every
language system will have its own genius, and comparisons are at best
hypotheses that need constant checking as new information becomes
available.

The Hittite -hi conjugation is, of course, intimately related to the issue
of voice. Your statemtent: "The Anatolian -hi conjugation is the IE
perfect, period", however, may overstate your case! I wonder if you meant
to say this in the sense 'is identical to' rather than some sense of
'corresponds to' or 'reflects'? Hittite also has a periphrastic
construction with hark- 'have' plus the participle that Benveniste compared
to a Latin habeo plus its past passive participle. It has been said to have
'perfect' meaning, and in function the Hittite hark- construction often had
the sense of the old IE perfect. Well, that is just a note. I think you
meant something more to do with formal comparison.

On the formal the origin of the Hittite -hi conjugation, I feel more
comfortable with Erich Neu's view that it reflects a categorial prototype
of the historical Greek and Sanskrit perfect, not that category itself, and
that Hittite, like the other older languages, also underwent changes from a
PIE system that did not have the categorial oppositions of any of the
attested languages.

Yes, Hittite does have distinct -hi and medio-passive sets of endings, both
sharing a PIE *-H. The derivation of Hittite -hi from older *-hai goes back
to the view that an old occasional Hittite spelling -he (not the usual -hi)
would argue for an *-ai after the *-H. Maybe so, but Hittite productively
differentiated between the active -hi forms and the medio-passive forms, as
well as active -mi forms:
-mi     -hi     -ha(hari)
-si     -ti     -ta(ti)
-zi     -i      -a(ri), -ta(ri)

I don't think we disagree about that. The issue seems to be the implication
of these forms for the reconstruction of PIE. Some people also identify the
-hi forms with thematic actives. The mappings are not one-to-one between
Hittite and Greek or Sanskrit like they mostly are between Greek and
Sanskrit.

Another major issue is whether the Hittite or Anatolian system was more
like PIE or had undergone major category losses, i.e., did Hittite lose a
PIE perfect and have only recollection of it in the Hittite -hi
conjugation, or did Hittite never get so far as creating an inflectional
perfect? Before the decipherment of Hittite, Meillet (1908: Dialects of IE)
identified peculiarities of Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian that he
thought were post-PIE. Now that we have Hittite and Tocharian, there are
more reasons to believe him.

On Hittite kuen-, I translate it 'strike', not 'kill'. In Hittite royal
annals, a king often 'strikes' the enemy with the result that sometimes the
enemy dies, sometimes he just runs away. The action type of kuen- is not
clearly transitive in any telic sense. Hittite kuen- is also a -mi verb for
which the passive is the suppletive -hi verb ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'die', which is
attested with medio-passive endings. One might have expected kuen-, if it
behaved like English 'kill' to have active -mi and medio-passive forms. I
don't know what the system of Hittite is doing here, but I find it
fascinating to try to find out. But if Hittite was at all like PIE in this
respect, then the argument for a PIE passive of *ghwen- is hereby weakened.
One would like to find medio-passive forms of this root in Hittite, and I
haven't.

Yes, Ilya Yakubovich thinks that there is a Sanskrit stative that argues
for a PIE stative. In the same volume I gave reasons for a very different
view. I stand by my reasons and would agree with Jamison's having given up
the idea.

There are many issues here, the last more interesting to me:

Jens wrote:

>It seems to me that there is a basic error inherent in the frequent
>"explanation" of mysterious categories and forms as "late", "secondary" or
>"einzelsprachlich". If a morphological type is too young to belong to the
>protolanguage it must have been formed from material the protolanguage,
>indeed the particular poststage of it had, and then it should be easier,
>not harder, for us to discover its origins, for in that case the timespan
>to be bridged is shorter than in the case of very old forms. This error is
>very often committed when dealing with categories that have become
>productive, such as the thematic verbs or the s-aorist. They became
>productive, oh yes, and so all their examples cannot go back to the
>protolanguage, but some MUST, otherwise there would have been no nucleus
>for the expansion.

CFJ's view: This is precisely the challenge that faces us, to distinguish
the age of a morphological form and category. Now we have the work of
earlier centuries behind us and their work on basic similarities which
scholars in this century like Meillet, Porzig, and others since have begun
to sort out in terms of dialect groupings. We know that not all
constructions go back as many thousands of years as others, and we know
that one thing that languages all do is change. In the process they
innovate, lose, and rearrange. What is productive at any given stage may or
may not be old. And some languages had a lot longer to change before they
were first written down, so it's really important to evaluate the relative
archaism of a form or construction. Certainly the -s plural on English
nouns enjoys a distribution that it did not centuries and millennia ago.
The real challenge is to try to arrive at criteria for identifying the
'nucleus for the expansion' as opposed to the layers that got added.

Contributions to this issue, however, are more likely to come in articles
than our current format.

Best regards,

Carol



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