Word-internal “thorn” clusters and the dative singular of the PIE 1st person pronoun

• Autores: Svenja Bonmann
• Localización: Historische Sprachforschung = Historical linguistics, ISSN 0935-3518, Nº. 135, 2022, págs. 43-74
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Early PIE had an unstressed 1st person pronoun dative singular *(h₁)medʱg̑i̯o. Already before the breakup of PIE, this *(h₁)medʱg̑i̯o underwent a regular simplification of its consonant cluster (*VT.KI̯V > *V.KI̯V) which resulted in PIE *(h₁)medʱg̑i̯o. This reduction is reminiscent of the weather-rule insofar as it depended on an unaccented vowel preceding the consonant cluster. The Pre-Germanic dialect of PIE did not participate in this reduction, because it lost final *-i̯o very early. As a consequence, early PIE *(h₁)medʱg̑ʱi̯oʱ was reduced to dialectal PIE/Pre-Germanic *(h₁)medʱg̑ʱ. The latter form is a plausible predecessor of Proto-Germanic *miz, because “thorn” clusters apparently evolved into sibilants within Germanic (and to a sequence -(K)sT- in Balto-Slavic), as is indicated by the words for ‘thousand’ or ‘bear’. Simultaneously, PGmc. miz preserves and thus demonstrates (together with the other Gmc. personal pronouns) the highly archaic unstressed usage of the form (unstressed *e > *i). Vedic máhya(m) reflects a newly accented *(h1)még̑ʱi̯o, Armenian inj (and perhaps Waxi maẓ̌) may continue unaccented *(h₁)meg̑ʱi̯o, whereas Old Latin mihei and Umbrian mehe are ambiguous as to the stress (either based on *(h₁)még̑ʱi̯o or *(h₁)meg̑ʱi̯o), but in any case remodeled forms using the normal dative ending *-ei̯. The other Indo-European branches replaced the inherited dative with new formations.