1 post tagged “qar”
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.
