H1 and t??

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

In reply to Glen Gordon's post of Mon, 5 Apr 1999

> Does this [viz., s-stems denoting a state] have anything to do with an
>IE *-st(i) ending, perhaps? (cf. Hittite talukasti and OSlav. dlugosti)

I'm sure it does. If s-stems can derive participle-like adjectives such as
Lat. modes-tu-s, augus-tu-s (ptc. of denom.vb., the latter orig. meaning
"having made strength", i.e. "being strong, strong"), surely there could
also be corresponding abstract formations in *-ti-s ("the situation of
having made length, the situation of being long, longness"). It proves the
IE apparatus of derivation very large and very old.

> Gee, maybe it's that **-t > *-s thing. Just a thought. Ooops, I forgot.
> Too simple. We must posit **-c to cloak it in phonetic mystery. What was
> the reason for **-c again?

My reason was that there is surely also a /t/ that does not go to /s/ when
word-final. Actually, that is not the precise rule; we also have /-s-/
before weak case-endings and before the fem. marker in the ptc. in gen.
*-us-os, fem.Nsg *-us-iH2, but nom. *-wo:t-s with voc. *-wos; probably
*le'wk-o:t-s, dat. *luk-e's-ey. We thus seem also to have /s/ before such
morphemes that once constituted syllables of their own; if they were once
WORDS, the rule is still "/s/ before word boundary, /t/ elsewhere". That
would mean, however, that the strong cases were old inflections, while the
weak cases were collocations of stem + postposition, and that SOME
suffixes use the old sound rules while others do not; since not all
suffixes are equally old this just looks like any normal language. - But
the 3sg *-t must be a different morpheme; also, one would not like the
consonant of the demonstrative pronoun *to- to be the same as that of the
pronoun of 2nd person and, since both appear to have external (non-IE)
relatives, the immediate solution is to see here a partial merger of
originally separate phonemes. My own Danish has the initial dentals /t-/
and /d-/, but there used to be thorn also - what's the big deal?

> JENS RASMUSSEN:
>   pron. *tu, *t(w)e [I'll keep my derivation of *yu(:)s, *usme and
>   *wos from protoforms with *t(w)- out of this]

> Thanks, because there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus.

That's what I believed until I succeeded in deriving them all from a
completely regular original system where Eng. you IS the acc.pl.
corresponding to nom.sg. thou. I had to invent some more sound laws, but
that just cannot be helped if we are digging into a past from where there
are no (or very few) other remains. It's like Eng. was/were which are just
about the ONLY regular verbal forms in a longer time perspective.

> JENS RASMUSSEN:
>   --- Now[...], [...] have we any
>   way of equating nominal //le'wk-ec-// and verbal //lewk-e'H1-//??

> On an ironic note, if you simply accepted my **-t > *-s rather than an
> off-the-wall **c phoneme, you would be closer to your sound rule goals,
> in addition to <gasp> agreeing with a modified version of Miguel's
> nonsensical sound change of **t > *H1, if you feel necessary to do.

I don't get this: If *-s is a fine outcome for you, as it is for me from
what I have labelled "*-c" (to avoid unwanted clashes), it all seems to
boil down to the question, "Can [s] become [h]?" We know the answer to
that is yes. But not even a change t > h is "nonsensical", the two
alternate in Modern Irish, tu'ath [tu@] 'people' : a thu'ath [@ hu@] 'his
people'. The tough thing is the conditioning which has not been found so
far.

Jens E.R.