Re: Indo-European question

On Sun, 17 Jun 2001, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:

> > Were they originally postpositions which became attached to the nouns?
> > If so, why do they seem to differ among languages so much?  -um in Old
> > English marks the plural dative, but in Latin -um marks the accusative and
> > neuter of some nouns.
>
> Since everybody else has addressed Latin -ae, I'll do this one: The
> reason is coincidence. According to Beekes 1995:
>
> PIE o-stem acc.sg. was -om, which went to -an and then -a in Germanic,
> while remaining relatively recognizable as -um in Latin.
>
> PIE o-stem dat.pl was -omus, which went to -omiz and then -am in
> Germanic; the -m was generalized to all stem classes. Latin picked the
> original instr.pl. ending -ois > -i:s for dat/abl.pl., and so has no
> cognate for this morpheme.
>
> Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)
Very cool.

Is there an PIE paradigm somewhere on the web, by any chance?

--Pat


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