She-Wolves and Godesses
She-Wolves and Godesses in Sanskrit are and odd bunch. You have two types of ī-stems in Sanskrit (and also in Indo-european) the hysterodynamic and proterodynamic ones.
vṛkī- 'she-wolf' is one of the Hysterodynamic ones (which is quite rare).
nom. vṛkīs ( < *-iH-s)
acc. vṛkyam ( < *-iH-ém)
gen. vṛkyas ( < *iH-ós )
devī- 'godess' is Proterodynamic
nom. devī (< *-iH)
gen. devī-m (< *-iH-m)
acc. devyās (< *-iéH-s)
The most striking of this is, that 2 perfectly feminine words, perfectly animate and all, have two different flections and on top of that, one takes the nominative marker *-s while the other doesn't.
I'm imagining that at some earlier indo-european stage some cluster *Hs must have assimilated or something along those lines. But I have not quite figured out how these paradigms would work pre-syncope. And rather than leaving you all in the dark, I thought I'd post this up, and see if any readers have bright ideas where the nom. *-sg comes from, or why it is absent.
Beekes doesn't reconstruct it for PIE as far as I can tell. But then we would have to assyume quite a bizarre analogy. But any thoughts are welcome!
Comments
First, *-iH (> *-ī) and *-eh₂ (> *-ā) are certainly allomorphs, so the value of the laryngeal in the former variant is without a doubt *h₂. No need to be shy.
As for feminines, Anatolian shows us that PIE started with only two genders, animate and inanimate. In a nutshell, the inanimate became neuter while the animate split into masculine and feminine. I'm convinced that the morpheme later attributed to the feminine gender was originally just an "animate collective". Thus *-eh₂ and *-ih₂ are simply Pre-IE extensions of the oldest ending of all, the inanimate collective *-h₂, which also thankfully survives into PIE.
What that implies then is that there must have been a stage where feminines were still classified under the still-generalized animate gender and thus, obligated to take *-s in the nominative singular. In fact, this is proven by the preservation of *-(e/i)h₂s in a few forms that you've already noticed.
Nominative singular *-s is a syncopated form of an undeclined demonstrative *so, originally meaning "the" (ie. general deixis, +definite), but grammatically only applied to animate nouns. Inanimate nouns were originally unmarked for definiteness (hence no use of *so there) or plurality, and most normally were understood by default to be patients in transitive actions. The strict use of definite marker *so with only animate nouns caused the demonstrative to be incorporated into the paradigm of *to- 'that' (which originally opposed *ko- 'this') as the nominative case form of *to-, replacing an originally endingless form. Meanwhile the new encliticized animate nominative case suffix was clipped to *-s and also strictly animate in usage. Much later in a subset of the Common IE dialect area, feminine nouns as a distinct gender class began to form out of the already-existent group of "collectivized animates" in *-(e/i)h₂. This new feminine gender can be thought of as a "hybrid" noun class, whereby it inherited the animate case endings while adopting some characteristics of inanimate gender (ie. lack of *-s).
Anyone care to propose a better idea?
Also, do you have any suggestion as to what was the cause for the emergence of this allomorphy?
Also isn't it curious how the distribution of the nominative *-s ending is bound to whether it is Proterodynamic or Hysterodynamic. Would you consider that to be a popularisation of a residual *-s that became popular in one conjugation class maybe to distinguish the two classes more clearly?
I was rather hoping for some kind of phonetic motivation. Though I must admit I haven't been able to find a plausible reconstruction where such a situation can be formed. I was maybe thinking of a sort of Szemerényi's law where the *s would voice and lengthen the *e (and who knows maybe heighten it to *i?). Thus far no luck. Will dig into it more soon, after my exams probably, which start next week with Classical Tibetan and Vedic Sanskrit. :D
I agree that there's enough reason to reconstruct *h2 in *-iH, I was just copying from Beekes' introduction, who has a slightly more traditional take on things like that ;-) (also reconstructs the 1sg thematic as *-oH).
So far I'm thinking that the alternation of *e and *o (with the occasional change to *i) is a reflex of mid Late IE *ə in unstressed positions. That way, simple *i-stems and *i-reduplication are both explainable as the result of the pretonic reflex of this earlier schwa.
As for the accent distribution, I have to continue meditating on that and I never thought of it in those terms before. Clever. I have no solution so far.
P.S.: Damn you and your cautiousness, Beekes! Lol.