The Unification of Genitives!
For some time I've been wondering about the Indo-European genitive forms; Which anyone who reads my blog with any regularity has surely noticed.
As some of you may know, Indo-European has a different genitive form the nominal inflection than for the pronominal inflection. Later on the o-stems have taken up a lot of features of the pronominal inflection, as well as the pronominal genitive, but Hittite has convincing proof that this was not always the case; there Nominative and Genitive of a-stems (< PIE o-stems) are identical, ending in -aš.
The Indo-European pronominal ending is *-eso or *-oso; while the nominal ending is *-os or *-es. I believe I have found a way to unify these two forms as an originally identical ending.
To explain this I'll first have to bring in some theories which Glen Gordon has been working on considering a Pre-Indo-European syncope. Let me just stress that everything I present here are my theories, I'm not doing this to get respect and honour, but just so people won't think badly of Glen Gordon's awesome work if I make some terrible mistake in my reasoning.
Now for some spelling conventions. I am fairly traditional in displaying *e as *e and *o as *o, while it is quite likely that in fact the *o was an *a at some earlier stage. For an unknown vowel in my reconstructed pre-Indo-European forms I will use *a. Well, on to the actual theory now then!
For a word like 'father' we find the following paradigm
Nom. *ph₂tḗr
Gen. *ph₂trós
Now considering the 'Quasi-Penultimate Accent Rule' (QAR) and the syncope of almost all, if not all vowels outside of the accent we'd expect a Pre-Indo-European paradigm like this:
Nom. *p(a)h₂téro=so With pseudo-suffix *so-/to- 'this'
Gen. *p(a)h₂teró-sa With a true suffix and thus agreeing to the QAR.
The *so suffix later gave rise to a *rs cluster which lost the *s with compensatory lengthening, hence *ḗ. A similar process is later seen in classical Greek.
The syncopated final letter *o which appears in the genitive could also be the vowel *e, which gives a very nice explanation why most languages have generalised the *-ós suffix, while some (like Latin) show an *-és suffix.
Having shown this, let's now get to the really interesting part, the pronouns.
The previously mentioned stem *so-/to- 'this'(with it's curious alternation of stem *so- in the nominative *to- in the oblique) is great to show as an example.
Nom. *so(s)
Gen. *toso
The *-s ending in the nominative is obviously highly curious if it is indeed from the stem *so-/to- because you'd be saying *so=so 'this-this' in Pre-Indo-European. Luckily there's some proof that this is not the original form. Greek has the form ὁ which goes back to *so, and definitely not to *sos. Also there's the Sanskrit form of this word सः saḥ which has a variant 'Sandhi' form स sa. Although this variant isn't usable in all contexts, the form is not a regular sandhi variant, which makes it likely that this is in fact the older form.
I think with that I have sufficient proof to not reconstruct this nominative *-s for pre-Indo-European
Now onto the pre-Indo-European forms
Nom. *so
Gen. *to-so
What can be said about these forms?
First, the nominative taking the penultimate accentuation into account, should be accented before itself, which is not even unthinkable (accentless words in Greek can do this). How come it didn't syncopate then? Well, that can have several reasons. Either the form *so was in fact *só dealing with the impossible accentuation by simply placing the accent on the only possible position. We do not have much proof for this though. It is in fact likelier that this particle was just 'unaccented'. How come it didn't undergo syncope? Well the fact that the word would've then be **s might be an indication. Another reason is that really short particle-like words like *so-/to- tend to be very resistant to such syncopations which normal words regularly take part in.
Although the Genitive could in fact have been accentuated as **tóso giving a later form like **tós it clearly didn't. An explanation for this might be that the stem *so-/to- wasn't accentuated in the nominative and was thus felt as an 'unaccentable word'. Besides that this is of course still one of these particle-like words, even though it's in the genitive. Therefore not taking an accent but still being strangely resistant to syncopation.
Now, if we put next to each other the reconstructed genitive of father, and that of this we see the following:
Gen. *p(a)h₂teró-sa
Gen. *to-so
Where in the first form the suffix' vowel was still a mystery vowel, from the pronominal form it is quite clear that this should be *-o thus giving:
Gen. *p(a)h₂teró-so
With this the two forms of the genitive have finally been unified into a single suffix *-so. So obvious that I'm astounded it hadn't occurred to me sooner. Besides that it's also so obvious I'm sure it has occurred to other people too. nevertheless I'm here to inform both myself and my readers, so even if I'm the last one to discover this, it's still useful for me.
Comments
Phoenix: "Let me just stress that everything I present here are my theories, I'm not doing this to get respect and honour, but just so people won't think badly of Glen Gordon's awesome work if I make some terrible mistake in my reasoning."
Cool! This is exactly what I want to happen. I want rational people to discuss the little details of Pre-IE like this instead of just loose ideas. We shouldn't fear being "thought of badly" by what are in effect angry sociopaths who need therapy because who honestly in their right mind would actually look down on self-expression, constructivity, rationality and open information-sharing? The "Zero is hero" mentality may be good enough for the common people but I have no interest in being common and the world is far too jaded for me to take great interest in its petty politics.
Phoenix: "With this the two forms of the genitive have finally been unified into a single suffix *-so. So obvious that I'm astounded it hadn't occurred to me sooner. Besides that it's also so obvious I'm sure it has occurred to other people too."
My account of all this is slightly different. I suggest that the pronominal genitive ending *-so (which you write with added thematic vowel *-e-so or *-o-so) is just a variant of earlier *-syo, from mid Late IE *-s-ya, which in turn is comprised of the genitive plus an ancient, endingless oblique case form, *ya, of the relative pronoun *ya 'which, who, that' (> PIE *yo-s). I've explained before that this served as a handy semantic circumlocution (i.e. saying "of that which is of X" instead of directly "of X") in cases where the animate nominative in *-s of thematic nouns and the inherited genitive in *-(o)s would have otherwise merged without the intervention of the pronominal attachment.
We can all see this when we ponder on what the repercussions would be if the genitive of *ékwo-s were **ékwo-s (hence identical with the nominative) instead of *ékwo-syo. Note that since thematic nouns are so common and since accent on these stems is fixed to the initial (i.e. acrostatic), there would have simply been no means whatsoever to distinguish between the nominative and genitive forms without some added cue like agglutinated *-yo.
I date the event of Syncope to an entire thousand years before Proto-Indo-European and use this event as a marker for the beginning of the "Late IE period". There are many many many more changes that I observe between Syncope and PIE proper (changes in ablaut rules and word formation, Acrostatic Regularization, Schwa Diffusion and Merger, Vowel Shift, etc.), and so a millenium seems to me to be a reasonable amount of time to allow these other changes to transpire.
Phoenix: "The *-s ending in the nominative is obviously highly curious if it is indeed from the stem *so-/to- because you'd be saying *so=so 'this-this' in Pre-Indo-European."
My view is that *so was originally an undeclined deictic that was incorporated into the *to- paradigm at a very late date in Late IE, long after Syncope. If you want proof, try the 3ps *-t 'he, she, it' which is most sensibly from *ta (> *to- 'that') and agglutinated to the pre-existing 3ps form. Yet, for this to have happened semantically, it means that at that time *ta here could not have been anything other than A) a nominative case form, and B) used for animates as well as inanimates equally (since it was used to convey "he", "she" and "it"). In PIE proper, things are quite different: the animate form is *so and the inanimate form is *tod.
Meanwhile, it's important to realize that nominative *-s (from earlier *sa 'the', from whence also comes PIE *so) was always strictly for animate usage, never inanimate. We never see *-s used as an inanimate nominative ending. There's no such thing.
So this gives us a big hint about the original paradigm and usage of *to-. and the paradigm (or lack thereof) and usage of *so. We can deduce then that *to- was once entirely undifferentiated for gender with an endingless nominative form *ta (also used for the locative case). This original nominative form was later replaced by undeclinable *sa, but only in the animate nominative case, while the inanimate nomino-accusative form probably continued to be *ta until it acquired the additional post-Syncope inanimate ending *-d (also from *ta) which was borrowed from other pronouns like *kʷid ~ *kʷod 'what?'.
Haha, that's very controversial. I'd say almost any other linguist on this planet would say the opposite. From your reconstructed system though, it makes perfect sense.
I still feel a bit sceptical towards the amount of analogical switching around to get the necessary results. But this is hardly accountable as a wrong, rather it leaves me want to look for a more elegant solution. Which I will strive to do.
I've been steering away of reconstructing a realistic pre-indo-european for far too long now. I'm definitely delving into it.
As a small side note: The thing that always irked me about the personal endings -m -s -t was that they felt inverted -m = me -s = so -t = tu :D
Though of coure -t is great for a *to- 'this'. The 2nd person -s still annoys me. What is it doing there? :D Plenty of things to think about.