3 posts tagged “n-stems”

I'm on an *n-stem high it seems today. Today in my Vedic Sanskrit class we ran into something very interesting, once proposed by Alan Nussbaum. I'm not entirely sure what to think of it yet, but I thought I'd throw it at you guys to see what you think.

the passage we were reading was RV x. 129, 1
नास॑दासी॒न्नो सदा॑सीत्त॒दानीं॒
नासी॒द्रजो॒ नो व्यो॑मा प॒रो यत्।
किमाव॑रीवः॒ कुह॒ कस्य शर्म॒न्न्
अम्भः॑ किमा॑सी॒द्गह॑नं गमी॒रम्॥

I'll spare you the transcription and translation, these things can easily be found online, what's interesting is the word शर्म॒न्न् śármann which without sandhi loses that double n: śárman 'protection' loc.sg.

That's right it's a locative singular. Where is the ending? There isn't one, several n-stems in vedic sanskrit show up with an endingless locative. This is weird, something we'd like to have explained. Alan Nussbaum proposed that the *n-stem formant itself was actually the locative case. Maybe based on *h₁en 'in' ?  Either way, there's certain words that are naturally more prone to be coupled with cases, animate things will sooner get a dative, while inanimates will sooner get a locative. Taking the *n-stems as an old locative perfectly explains why there's endingless locatives in Sanskrit, and there is some reason behind it too.

Nevertheless, can a whole flection truly spring forth from one case form? One that isn't found anywhere anymore except for Sanskrit (and no doubt Avestan, though I know next to nothing about Avestan). I'm not sure what to thing, but it is a pretty exciting idea.

A long long time ago, I wrote a little article on my suspicion that maybe Indo-European didn't have a word final *n in the nominative of n-stems, and that Greek had in fact innovated. I have more proof for this now!

Namely in Lithuanian. Lithuanian, being the wonderful archaic language it is, still fully preserves n-stems. And guess what! The nom-sg. seems to end in *ō. For example the word for water vanduõ.
Nom. vanduõ
Gen. vandeñs
Acc. vándenį

Isn't that nice? Yes, yes it is.

If I were to reconstruct Late Indo-european *n-stems I would no longer reconstruct a word final *n, and consider Greek's *n an innovation.

*n stems in PIE traditionally end in *-ōn in the nominative which comes from an earlier *on-s (Known as Szemerenyi's law). While this is a very common reconstruction, much of the reconstruction is dependant on one language, Greek.

Greek n-stems indeed end in -ων, but I have my doubts whether that n isn't just an analogy from the other cases (for example the genitive is -ονος). If we look at Latin, Sanskrit and Gothic you would certainly get this impression.

For example Sanskrit rājan- 'king' loses its word final n in the nominative as rājā राजा. Also the Latin word for man homō, hominis clearly shows an absence of an n.

Lastly there's Gothic who has quite a few n stems. but the most interesting is guma 𐌲𐌿𐌼𐌰, mostly because it's cognate to Latin homō. Also guma is an n stem, its genitive is gumins and the accusative is guman.

With so much evidence that the *n disappears. Must we say that this is an PIE process? Or just a very common thing to happen in individual languages?

It is not usual for Sanskrit to lose the word final n if it is not in front of a long vowel, for Latin, I have no idea, Gothic, sadly, takes pleasure in taking off the last letter of almost any word.

It's actually quite difficult to determine when this shift then took place. But I prefer to go for the 'easier' solution, that it happened in one language, and then split into several languages retaining this development.

Assuming an isogloss after the split-up is also all but preferable. We like to see isoglosses between Greek and Sanskrit, not Sanskrit Latin and Gothic.

Another theory, which I'm not at all fond off, but that likes to pop up in articles every now and then is the 'sandhi' hypothesis.

This hypothesis claims that words ending in resonants usually had two variants, one in the form that it was followed by a vowel, and the other in the form when it was followed by a consonant. This for exmaple tries to explain the difference between the thematic Primary and Secondary endings.

*-om is the secondary ending and (according to these theorists) *-ō is the primary ending.

*ō would be the result of a pre-consonantal variant of the parent form *om, losing the m, with compensatory lengthening.
While *-om would be the pre-vocalic variant of the form *om, retaining the m, and of course, not undergoing compensatory lengething.

From there onwards, people can conclude that PIE was a SVO language, because a sentence final V would never have Sandhi variation (since nothing follows, usually). And though this idea is somewhat elegant (it allows to explain the medio-passive 3pl ending variation of *-ēr *-er *-r) I prefer to keep it simpler and going for the reconstruction of *-oh₂ for the primary ending rather than *ō.

This Sandhi idea could then also be stretched to the n-stems to explain why some languages retain it, and others don't.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, there's more readily available less exotic explanations for all these variations which have my preference.

So to conclude, my suspicion is that the disappearance of a word final *n before long vowels did indeed occur before the Indo-European languages split up, and where this *n does appear in one of its daughter languages, this is due to analogy from the other case forms.