Italic close to Slavic?

ECOLING at aol.com ECOLING at aol.com
Tue Mar 7 16:17:52 UTC 2000


What I believe I was remembering, and would fit the subject of
my question (Italic close to Slavic?) was something concerning the
membership in verbal conjugation classes, Latin a:/e:/short-e/i:-stems,
and matches in Slavic or elsewhere (where else if so?).
That also might be an archaism,
and it might therefore suggest nothing about a family tree,
but it could also be a reflection of significant dialect-network areas
in early PIE or IE, in a framework in which we consider such
dialect areas to be potentially of importance alongside or instead of
family tree views.  That is, stated much more precisely,
the kind of question I was asking.

Thanks for the mention of where the "r-passive" occurs:

In a message dated 3/7/2000 6:58:24 AM, jimbilbro at email.msn.com writes:

>In any case, what you may be remembering is that Celtic, Anatolian, and
>Tocharian all share all share a passive formation in /r/, as does Italic
>(and Phrygian?).  All four are also "centum"-languages.  The r-passive
>seems
>to be a shared retention of a fairly archaic formant.  Of course, this
>should not be interpreted to indicate any closer relationship between these
>languages in the PIE-period, beyond the fact that they were all
>centum-dialects.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics



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