Re: Old Nindic Object Pronouns

So essentially these all are...clitics?   Very interesting.   Reminds
me a little of Middle Egyptian, which had three different types
of pronouns, one of which (or, one type of which) worked in a
similar way to what you describe for Old Nindic.   One of these
I just can't wrap my head around, though:

(Longish snip coming.)

Elliott wrote:

<<3) The same pronoun forms are used after the
reduplicated syllable of the perfect tense, in older
texts, before other sound changes made this tense
obscure.

Examples (no pronouns):

pata /pada/  "he makes"
pepat "he has made" /pebad/  (later on: peit)

tili "he sees"
tetil "he has seen"     (later on: teil)

With pronouns:
penpatant rannot neit
pe-n-pat-ant   rann-ot   neit
make-u-STEM-2P king-def. your(2s)

"You have made us your king">>

First of all, how does this reduplication work?   Is it a reduplication
of the initial consonant prefixed to a prefixed /e-/, or is just a
coincidence that both /i/ and /a/ become [e] when reduplicated?
(Does "e" stand for [e] or [@]?)   Maybe it's just that something that
looks so cliticky in other places is being infixed in between a reduplicant
and its base that's throwing me off.

Or perhaps, if it worked just like all the rest, then the reduplicated
part is actually a preposition.   To use the woefully outdated term 
"morpheme"*,
one might think of the reduplicant as an empty morpheme which
means "perfect", and it takes the object clitic, but gains its phonological 
specification
from the beginning of the closest available CV sequence, which would be
the beginning of the verb...

It probably all comes down to the questions: (a) What is a word in Old
Nindic?, and (b) what are the criteria for what a word is in Old Nindic?

Bah.   My head hurts.   Anyway, really neat!   I totally dig this system you
described.

*Note: Just kidding.   Most people still think that morphemes are very
much in vogue.   I noticed that Philippe said that most authors agree
on what a morpheme is.   I'll agree that most *think* they agree, but
usually they don't.   And then there are some of us that think the very
concept of a morpheme, however you define it, is no longer a useful
concept at all.   (In most cases.   I just couldn't get away without
qualifying that--not yet.)

-David
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"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

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