H1 and t??

[Glen Gordon]

ME (GLEN):
  Gee, maybe it's that **-t > *-s thing.
JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN:
  My reason was that there is surely also a /t/ that does not go to
  /s/ when word-final. [...]
  But the 3sg *-t must be a different morpheme;

I wouldn't say so. I explain the final *-t/*-d as being from *-tV.
Aside from the 3rd person singular, the distinction of *-d and *-t is
not clear at all and the 3rd person *-t can be explained through
influence of the primary *-ti. Boom, finito.

JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN:
  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".

"Weak" case-endings? Do you mean endings that don't have an
intervening vowel? If that's what you're talking about, everything is
fine. We need not consider that the suffixes were once words at all.

The Pre-IE nominative was apparently unmarked once as can be deduced
by phenomenon within IE itself, even if you don't trust a Nostratic
explanation of IE pre-history. Thus, the IE noun stem was once a
complete word. Here's a pseudo-example with an imaginary animate word
**kut to see what I'm talking about:

              Pre-Pre-IE       Pre-IE           IE
  Nominative   **kut           **kwes-se       **kwes  (<**kwes-s)
  Accusative   **kut-im        **kwesem        **kwesm
  Genitive     **kut-isi       **kwesese       **kwese's
  Ablative     **kut-ita       **kweseta       **kwese'd

Even though a **-t only existed in the nominative, the change of
**-t > *-s spread throughout the paradigm when a complete form **kut
no longer was thought of as a complete word, being replaced with the
concept of noun stems like **kwes-.

When an intervening vowel is present, this is only because that vowel
is part of the stem itself. Thus, we should expect *-t- to remain
because it always was _medial_, not final. Here's a pseudo-example of
the development of a vowel-final stem **kuti:

              Pre-Pre-IE       Pre-IE           IE
  Nominative   **kuti          **ku:te-se      **ku:tes
  Accusative   **kuti-m        **ku:tem        **ku:tem
  Genitive     **kuti-si       **ku:tese       **kute's
  Ablative     **kuti-ta       **ku:teta       **kute'd

See now? Nothing contradicts what I'm saying except for one thing -
your nominative *-wo:t-s. I'm going to call its reconstruction into
question and ask whether we can really tell whether it had *-ts or
in fact *-s/*ss. The strong and weak cases are equally old and both
derive from postpositions if we go far enough back.

JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN:
  [...] also, one would not like the consonant of the demonstrative
  pronoun *to- to be the same as that of the pronoun of 2nd person

Hungary disagrees. I could be wrong but I thought Hungarian's -l marks
both 2nd and 3rd person, but at any rate, such things can and do
happen. Look at Swedish. They don't know how to conjugate verbs
anymore, tsk, tsk.

I suspect you aren't seeing what I'm saying just yet. Maybe I should
illustrate another example to make it clearer. Here's the development
of the imperfective/perfective in IE the way I see it (sorry for all
the "Pre"'s but I have to get into detail here :)

       Pre-Pre-Pre-IE   Pre-Pre-IE     Pre-IE          IE
1ps    *-mu; *-?u       *-m; *-h<w>  *-m; *-h<w>    *-m/*-h<w>
2ps    *-tu; *-nu       *-t; *-n     *-s; ZERO      *-s/*-(s)the
3ps    *-su; ZERO       *-s; ZERO    *-s/-t; ZERO   *-t/ZERO

Some may notice I've suddenly altered my position on the 3rd person to
a ZERO instead of *-e. Sorry 'bout that, I'm not perfect(ive) you
know.

Anyways, according to this illustration, the 2nd and 3rd person
temporarily merge in both the imperfective AND the perfective in
Pre-IE (oh-oh!). What is the budding Indo-European to do? What it does
is attach different suffixes to the endings to distinguish the two
persons. In the perfective, it attaches *-the to the 2p derived from
the imperative with optional *-s from the imperfective. In the 3rd
person sing imperfective, the previously inanimate 3p *-t (derived
from *-to) is favored over *-s because of the icky merger (At the same
time, **-e'n becomes **-e'n-t > *-e'r).

Boom, finito.

JENS RASMUSSEN:
  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?

These are FINAL distinctions I'm talking about and the arguement is
only to do with IE, not in general. There aren't many IE dental
endings to chose from - that's the big deal.

IE 3rd person *-t has an external explanation?? I don't recall,
explain please. Perhaps you're talking about a demonstrative in *t
that is reconstructed for Nostratic? The suffix *-t whether it
derives from an archaic demonstrative or not is unique to IE and the
only best explanation is that it recently derives from *-to but then
sound rules on syllable loss become necessary (and ultimately **-t >
*-s) in order to explain this and much more phenomenon that can't be
explained otherwise.

ME (GLEN):
  [...] there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus.
JENS RASMUSSEN:
  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,

Still don't get it. How does *t- become *y-?? Must be a pretty nifty
sound law. Why can't *yus be derived from a verb *yu:- (*yeu-) "to
join" as in "a bunch (of people)"? We know, from examples in Japanese,
that nouns can at times become pronouns and *yus looks very unique to
IE.

JENS RASMUSSEN:
  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]?" [...] not
  even a change t > h is "nonsensical",

Yes, Nonsensical (when talking about IE though). Of course, the sound
changes themselves are fully possible in a general sense but this is
the IE list and we aren't discussing general linguistics. A phoneme *c
is unmotivated by the evidence and so is **-t > *-H1. What I propose
does not necessitate extra phonemes and the sound changes are quite
tame by comparison.

--------------------------------------------
Glen Gordon
glengordon01 at hotmail.com