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Re: Evidence for Nostratic? (was Re: Proto-Uralic?)

From:Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
Date:Tuesday, July 8, 2003, 18:31
On Tue, 8 Jul 2003 18:12:01 +0100, Joe <joe@...> wrote:

>AFAIK, the standard reconstruction for 'foot' is 'ped-', nom. sg. 'peds'.
OK, so the earlier root (and nom. sg.) is *pád(a)-. Add to this my proposed genitive in *-sa and regular penultimate stress-accent, and you get gen. sg. *pádsa or *padása. Aside from the possibility that the sigmatic nominative derives from a postposed animate demonstrative, is it possible that: 1. Stress accent was abandoned, and tonal accent established. 2. Genitive suffix was reduced to -s via apocope. 3. New genitive suffix was extended anologically to root-noun 'nominative' stems as an ergative suffix; or, if the original gen. sg. was indeed *padsa, a new genitive was extended analogically based on genitive adjectives (or something like that?). Another possibility is that stress-accent lengthened the neutral vowel, which then became /o/, and tonal accent appeared later (if at all). - Rob