Genetic Descent

[Douglas G Kilday]

petegray (24 Jun 2001) wrote:

>The highly productive English morpheme -ess appears to derive (through Late
>Latin) from the Greek -issa which appears, from its phonetic shape and other
>factors, to be a loan into Greek from some substrate.

I'm not sure we need to invoke substrate for the feminine suffix -issa. It
can plausibly be regarded as an extraction from feminine ethnonyms like
<Phoi'nissa> and <Ki'lissa> in which the final [-k-] of the ethnic stem was
palatalized by the feminine suffix [-ya]. This didn't happen to the
corresponding choronyms because their final Alpha was long and the preceding
Iota took the accent: <Phoiniki'a:>, <Kiliki'a:>, etc.

Similarly, stem-final [-t-] has been palatalized in <me'lissa> 'honeybee'
from *melit-ya, which nobody would dare to refer to substrate. Such words
resemble the toponyms and phytonyms in -issos which _are_ best explained as
coming from non-IE substrate, but the groups should be kept separate in
one's etymological thinking.

DGK