Latin mecum, tecum, etc.

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lionel Bonnetier" <leo at easynet.fr>
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2001 2:07 AM

> It's funny that Latin suffixed -cum in mecum, tecum, etc.
> has created some special -go case marker in Spanish with
> conmigo, contigo, consigo. I suppose -cum is a remnant of
> an older time when prepositions were either postpositions
> or relatively mobile adverbs. Is there any obvious reason
> why -cum is the only instance of the archaic system? May
> *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related
> etymologically around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

[Ed]

Why do you call Sp. -go a case marker? Isn't 'contigo' simply a popular
formation based upon 'tecum' (>tigo), with 'con' added when people became
unaware of the meaning of -go?

In Brabant Dutch dialects you have a similar phenomenon with the duplication of
the 2sg. pronoun when it was forgotten that -de was originally 'du' (a lost
word in later Dutch, like 'thou' in English. 'Gij' corresponds to 'you',
originally a plural):

Du. 'hebt gij...?' (Have you ...?) , dial. 'hedde-gij?' < hebst du gij?  'Gij'
is clearly superfluous like 'con-' in 'contigo', as long as you still
understand the original formation (quod non, for all, except a few linguists).

I'm really looking forward to the answers to your question about cum/cis/-que.
We already had an informative discussion about *kom (Lat. cum/con-, but also
Germanic ge-).

Ed. Selleslagh