PIE ablaut & Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) wrote:

>A major reason for doing exhaustive studies of Hittite 'know' and other verbs
>such ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'eat' was to explore the ablaut types in Hittite that
>differed from e.g., es-/as- 'be'. At that time I noted (pp. 14-16 on
>etymology) just a few etymological relations. The major one was the
>comparison with the singular:plural alternation of the old perfect (vida:
>vidma, wait:witum etc.) suggesting that Hittite 'know' might be
>grammatically cognate, albeit not formally cognate, with the IE pattern.

>An oddity which looked even older was the one with Latin sum, sumus, sunt:
>es, est, estis that had a parallel in Hittite uhhi, umeni, uwanzi : auti,
>auszi, aummeni, autteni 'see'. Then (as now) there were phonological
>explanations for the 'sum' set, but the fact that Hittite 'see' showed such
>a similar patterning raised questions in my mind as to whether the
>phonological explanation of the Latin forms might not be ad hoc, that these
>two (independent?) groupings of a 1sg, 1pl, and 3pl together with zero
>grade-like forms as opposed to 2sg, 3sg, and 2pl full grade forms might not
>reflect something almost totally lost to us.

>In that context the sg:pl alternation looked like a reanalysis or leveling
>of an older pattern on a basis (sg vs. pl) that we still understand.

That's an interesting possibility.  However, it is difficult to
see what 1sg, 1pl and 3pl might have had in common from an
accentual point of view.  The singular/plural split, on the other
hand, makes good sense in that respect: the plural forms had one
extra syllable ("plural" *-en-), which may have caused the accent
to shift one syllable to the right.

Also, if *o derives from **a:, as I have proposed, the Hittite
a/e ablaut in the hi-conjugation can be seen as old, and be
derived by the rule that unaccented *a: (in the plural) is
shortened to *a (> *e), while accented *a: (in the singular)
remains and becomes *o (Hitt. /a/).  Shortened *e in the plural
may have attracted the accent secondarily in Hittite (so it
remained as /e/), while in the other IE languages it may have
stayed unaccented and therefore suffered further reduction to
zero (o/zero Ablaut in the PIE perfect).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl