Uralic and IE

[Glen Gordon]

ME (GLEN):
 First off, I had the funny notion that the 1rst person perfective was
 *-H3 not *-H2
 [...]
 The fact that non-Anatolian languages seem to have either
 -o or both -o AND -a (like Greek) suggests to me that -o is archaic
 and -a is not.

MIGUEL:
 How can /a/ be a derivative of *(e)H3? We *can* derive /o(:)/ from
 *(e)H2 (O-Stufe).
 [...]
 Huh?  Which -o are you talking about?  Which langauge has -o in
 the 1sg. perfect?

Alright, I'll listen. I'm curious: How do we obtain /o(:)/ out of *(e)H2
then?

[ Moderator's comment:
  As MCV parenthetically noted, it has been hypothesized that **oH2 (that is,
  "apophonic *o which alternates with *e") > *o: rather than *a:.  It has its
  attractions.
  --rma ]

MIGUEL:
 Tocharian shows how easy it would have been to newly develop
 a conjugation based on the personal pronouns [...] But the fact is
 that all other IE languages have stubbornly held on to *-m, *-s, *-t,
 which must have a different origin.

ME (GLEN):
 Must have? Alright, what is that "different origin"?

MIGUEL:
 Who knows?  I can offer all kinds of speculations: an earlier
 stage where the pronominal elements *so and *to were
 distinguished by having 2nd and 3rd person deixis respectively,
 [...]

Which is more involved a theory than to say that they derive from the
personal endings (which seems the simpler conclusion). Please don't say
"must have" unless you really mean it.

MIGUEL:
 [...]a connection with 2d.p. plural su-mes/su-wes, etc. In any case,
 the PIE *-m, *-s, *-t system is independent of the PIE pronominal
 *m-, *t-, [*s-] pattern.  It cannot be otherwise.

Really. You're being cleverly distractive now. There's nothing that
should have us conclude anything stranger than that Tocharian endings
derive from IE endings. You've shown us nothing that fortifies this
assertion.

ME (GLEN):
 I still maintain that some instances of IE *-s derive from a
 previous **-t. Examples of this besides the 2nd person singular *-s
 would be *-mes "we" (**-mit), *-tes "you" (**-tit) and the plural
 *-es (**-it).

MIGUEL:
 Well, I maintain that **-t > *-H1.  Witness the Hittite instr.
 -it > PIE *-(e)H1 [Beekes].  Also **-ent > **-erH1 > -e:r.

But are we assured that Hittite -it can only derive from a form like
*-eH1, as opposed to endings like *-od [ablative] or *-dhi that would
follow a more oft-seen sound correspondance? You've had this idea for a
while now and no doubt, being that you strike me as a good chess player,
you've contemplated firm answers long ago to the questions I'm going to
pose but here we go...

This would mean that IE *-H1 becomes Hittite -t? Why does one need to
posit something so strange? The heteroclitic can be explained as *-nD >
*-r (D being a dental stop), as I've been saying without the need for
positing "stealth" suffixes.

If we accept your proposal of *H1 > Hittite <t> and **n>*r (I'm assuming
you mean in final position only, not mediofinal), we first have a
sparsely attestable suffix *-H1 for instrumental that would often end up
as a long vowel in non-Anat lgs that could be derivable from anything
within the confines of our tiny universe. Second, why is the
heteroclitic so special, lacking a nominative suffix the way it does?
That on top of an odd IE *H1 > Hittite <t> sound change to begin with,
that hasn't been shown to be necessary. How often does a final glottal
stop become a final dental? I've heard of the reverse. If it does happen
in real languages, it ain't too common at all, you'll have to agree.

If you can accept those kinds of rarities, I fail to see why you've
bothered to rearrange the IE stops due to the rarity of its system. This
is alot of g'fuffle for very little. I think the more direct sound
changes that I propose are still more reasonable and doubly provide more
correlations between IE and Uralic in the process:

                    *-      < **-n
                    *-s     < **-t
                    *-r     < **-nt/**-nd/**-ndh
                        (This one's from Joachim-Alscher, btw)
                    *-r     < **-rC

                    *-n     < **-nV
                    *-t/*-d < **-tV
                    *-C     < **-CV

It even shows a pwetty pattern. They can be split into two: sound
changes arising from final phonemes laxing up & simplifying, and sound
changes arising from the loss of final syllable. It's basically a
reshuffling of final consonants. *H1 > <t> is a plug-hole theory that
explains too little.

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