PU *nimi / PIE *HneH3men- (was: Re: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics)

Fabrice Cavoto fabcav at adr.dk
Fri Mar 3 06:58:12 UTC 2000


[ moderator re-formatted ]

> There is no reason to concider *-i (= your *-e) in PU *nimi 'name' a stem
> formant. *-i is no known a PU morpheme

[Fabrice Cavoto]  It certainly is, see below.

> , and *nim- couldn't even
> theoretically be a PU morpheme, since all roots (except pronouns and the
> two auxilaries) had to be of shape *(C)V(C)CV-.

[Fabrice Cavoto]  See f.ex. Decsy 1990, p. 26-35, as well as, more
recently, Abondolo (ed) 1998, p. 6-7. The structure of Uralic *roots* is V,
CV, CVC or CVCV. The fact that PUral. *words* ended in a vowel doesn't
imply that the vowel was originally part of the root. Some call it
"thematic vowel", other "stem vowel", and it is mostly seen as an element,
or part of an element, forming stems. Whether it is for prosodic or
morphologic reasons is not entirely clear, but the fact that the vowel is
not always the same (since there are a-stems, e/i-stems), and that it
happens that the same root is attested with both, also points to the fact
that that element, what ever we call it, is added on the root.



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