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| DiachronyOfPreIE_2008Oct13.pdf |
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It seems that, in all the immense details that I've deduced over the years on Pre-IE, I forgot about Thematicization which is what I call the point at which productive animate suffixes were derived from their inanimate counterparts by infixing a vowel schwa during the middle of the Late IE Period. I presume that the reason for this infixing is not because the schwa was an actual animatizing morpheme but rather by analogy with the fact that most animate stems happened to be thematic (i.e. stems ending in a schwa) while inanimate stems tended to be athematic (i.e. stems ending in a consonant).
I want to talk more on this because it relates to the eventual development of feminine gender in Post-IE dialects. That is, out of the ancient inanimate collective *-h2 would be forged a new animate collective *-eh2 that would later be used as a feminine marker. This also relates to the origin of Indo-European s-stems that Phoenix has recently been pondering on (and which made me ponder on lately).
UPDATES
(14 Oct 2008) Whoops, a teensy typo to fix in the text above. The phrase "while inanimate stems tended to be inanimate (i.e. stems ending in a consonant)" should have read "while inanimate stems tended to be athematic (i.e. stems ending in a consonant)."
A great! I was already having some trouble with the fact that *-r of neuters seems to come from *ar and *-er of communes from *-éra. This perfectly unifies the two!
ReplyDeleteOne critical question though: do you have hard numerical evidence that indeed the majority of the animates were thematic?
Phoenix: "One critical question though: do you have hard numerical evidence that indeed the majority of the animates were thematic?"
ReplyDeleteThat's a tough one. My conclusion is based more on deduction than hard statistics, data which is evidently impossible to amass in this situation. My thinking is that, due to phonotactic peculiarities, animates should have had more opportunities to develop thematic stems than inanimates did. The important difference between animates and inanimates afterall is the inflection of the nominative singular. Inanimate stems must have been endingless from the beginning while animate stems would have consistently terminated in *-sa by late Mid IE (> PIE *-s).
The nominative ending would have affected the outcome of Mid IE's thematic stems after Syncope since the nominative form would be the citation form. So an animate MIE nominative of the form *CVCCa-sa would become *CVCCə-s:ᵊ via Reduction and then finally *CVCCə-z. Whereas, an equivalent inanimate MIE nominative would be of the form *CVCCa (that is, endingless) in MIE which would reduce to *CVCCᵊ and then finally *CVCC after Syncope.
The result? A surplus of thematic animates in comparison to inanimate ones, exactly what we observe in later PIE proper.
That's quite a convincing explanation actually thanks :)
ReplyDelete