Inanimate thematics that failed to be converted in Pre-IE?

In my previous post, I explained that I recently pondered on how Syncope would have affected inanimate thematic noun stems. If I'm right that many animate thematic stems in Mid Indo-European (MIE) were preserved by resisting Syncope due to phonotactic reasons such as avoiding awkward syllable codae, then one should expect that inanimate thematic stems should have behaved similarly.

After pondering on a potential Semitic loan *qárnu "horn" and its likely path of borrowing into PIE, I came to the conclusion that inanimate thematic nouns indeed did survive into early Late IE (eLIE) but that they were endingless in the nominative and accusative. This means that this would have resulted in wordforms such as *kérnə "horn" in the nomino-accusative. I fleetingly mentioned at the end of my last post that if these stems had survived unmolested, Indo-Europeanists would be speaking of *e-stems (i.e. **kérne). Instead however, this thematic stem appears to be reconstructed as *krnóm. This and other inanimate thematic stems exhibit interesting effects such as the curious disappearance of *m in the locative case (e.g. *yugóm "a yoke" but *yugó-i "among a yoke") which leads many to assume that this was a functional ending rather than the product of misanalysis and missegmentation by early Indo-European speakers. So I take it that these endingless stems must have been converted by adding the genitive ending *-óm by analogy with inanimate thematic adjectives but were reanalysed as thematics ending in *-ó- with a pseudo-ending *-m in the nominative and accusative cases. I don't think that the final nasal stop had anything to do with the accusative case ending which was restricted to the animate stems anyway.

Yet, if these stems were "converted", surely the process wasn't entirely complete, was it? Could there be still some evidence of bare thematic stems in the language that failed to be converted? So now I'm starting to wonder whether this might explain the curious shape of the numeral *pénkʷe "5". If this numeral had been originally treated as a collective inanimate noun in Mid IE, its failure to be converted would be natural if it came to be solely understood as a numeral rather than a generic noun. Thus MIE *kérna "horn" > eLIE *kérnə > *kr̥n-ám (conversion) > *ḱr̥nó-m (missegmentation) yet MIE *pénkʷa > eLIE *pénkʷə > *pénkʷe (no conversion in numerals). Word-final schwa in early Late IE is expected to become PIE *-e# since it only becomes *-o- word-medially in the presence of a following voiced segment and this then explains the thematic vocative case which ends in *-e (i.e. the vocative case was endingless causing this Pre-IE schwa to be word-final).

What happened to Pre-IE's inanimate thematics?

This past week has been a little busy (i.e. a new job, looking after my parents' bratty dog, summer tanning, etc.) and so I've been slacking a little on my blog. Mea culpa. Of course, hectic life doesn't stop me from thinking and theorizing about ancient languages. NEVER! It only stops me from typing for a while. It's probably just as well because it gives me time to develop some more elaborate ideas to share. So I just noticed something in the past few days that I had never realized before concerning inanimate thematic nouns.

Over the years, I've slowly come to the conclusion that Syncope didn't obliterate all the schwas in early Late IE (eLIE) and that a few resisted the rule due to reasons regarding proper syllabicity. So a disyllabic wordform in Mid IE (MIE) of the shape *CVC.CV- should have preserved its final schwa because if it had disappeared, it might create problems with the distribution of the consonants in the remaining syllables^[1]. For example, I believe that the PIE word *h₁éḱwo- "horse" had survived Syncope (i.e. MIE *ʔékwa- > eLIE *ʔékwə- and not **ʔéku-). I also concluded thus far that some animate thematic nouns were derived from genitive-declined stems that are an artifact of a stage of Pre-IE when adjectives were once formed by way of the genitive case (either *-ás or *-ám at the time) and did not originally agree with the case of the nouns they modified. Inanimate adjectives were declined with *-ám while animate adjectives were declined with *-ás until they were "misanalysed" by prehistoric speakers as vowel-ending stems with terminating consonantal endings, nominative *-s (e.g. *wĺ̥kʷo-s "wolf") and a (nomino-)accusative ending *-m (e.g. *yugó-m "yoke"). Or at least, so say I.

That being said, I was recently investigating a potential loanword from Semitic, namely the "horn" word. In Proto-Semitic, the word is *qárnu while in Proto-Indo-European it's *ḱr̥nóm. At first, I was becoming disheartened by the apparent incongruence in accent, phonetics, etc. However, when I allowed my mind to explore what might have theoretically happened to thematic inanimate stems during Syncope, I came to realize that my theory had a gap that needed filling out. You see, if one ponders what would happen to a inanimate, rather than animate, vowel-ending stem in MIE during this period of time, we have to conclude that the final schwa should be preserved in the same way as animate stems when of the shape *CVC.CV-. If so, we end up with an interesting grammatical possibility because since inanimate nouns were endingless in the nominative or accusative case, my theory suggests that there should have originally been inanimate nouns ending only in a schwa.

So let's say that Proto-Semitic *qárnu was borrowed into Mid IE. We might rationally expect a form like *kérna, more than anything. Syncope would then fail to affect the final vowel in order to avoid syllabicity issues, thus a bare inanimate wordform *kérnə in the nominative and accusative cases. Obviously, at this point, this is not PIE as we know it but once I traced this interesting hypothesis to this point, I realized that I might be able to fill in the rest of the diachronic development. I think what happened next was that, for whatever reason, bare stems were undesirable to speakers and that once former genitive-declined adjectives were misanalysed as thematic stems, this provided a means to "complete" the awkward wordform with an imaginary "inanimate nomino-accusative" pseudo-ending *-m. Thus, this stem as well as other inanimate thematics must have been converted to this new "genitivized" form, thus *ḱr̥nóm with accent on the final syllable in imitation of genitive plurals. As extra food for thought, if this conversion had not taken place, inanimate thematics in Proto-Indo-European might have ended in *-e instead.

NOTES
^[1] These stem-final schwas are not always preserved and it appears to depend on individual phonotactic considerations. For example, I reason that MIE *ʔékwa- "horse" and *kérna "horn" would likely have resisted Syncope because *kw and *rn wouldn't have been valid syllable codae in early Late IE, the former violating sonority hierarchy and the latter showing adjacent tautosyllabic resonants which would have offended language-specific phonotactic restrictions at the time. On the other hand, MIE *nakʷta- "night" appears to have been reduced to early Late IE *nakʷt- (> PIE *nokʷt-) without interference, but then again, this is natural since the resulting cluster *kʷt was a perfectly valid syllable coda.

UPDATES
(Aug 09 2008) Added an important footnote about the phonotactic conditions behind stem-final vowel loss or preservation.