The Indo-European Languages by Kapovi? Mate; Giacalone Ramat Anna; Ramat Paolo

Author:Kapovi?, Mate; Giacalone Ramat, Anna; Ramat, Paolo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

The case endings

In some noun classes, perhaps within late PIE, contraction of the stem-final vowel and the vowel of the inflectional ending led to forms where it was not easy to distract stem and ending. Consider the dative singular of o-stems in which the ending -ō (VOL -oi) was the result of the contraction of *-o-ey > *-ōy and then the loss of diphthong-final y, e.g., VOL duenoi ‘good [man]’, CL bonō ‘good’. The same is true also for many cases in the ā-stem (< *-eh2) declension. The situation was further complicated by cross-paradigmatic borrowings of endings and, in particular, by the borrowing of endings from pronominal inflection. The genitive plural of ā-stem and o-stem nouns and adjectives is a case in point. The inherited genitive plural ending -um survived in a few o-stem nouns, e.g., deum ‘gods’, m. gen. pl., but most o-stems inflected with -rum (with lengthening of the stem vowel), an ending that was modeled on the genitive plural of ā-stem nouns, e.g., casārum ⟶ deōrum. But the ending -rum, from earlier *-som, was not part of the original ā-stem paradigm; it was borrowed from pronominal inflection.

The endings for Classical Latin consonant-stem nouns are given in Table 6.2. The inherited athematic endings, although altered by sound change in many cases, survived in the singular; the Latin ablative was formally the locative ending *-i. In the plural the nominative ending -ēs was borrowed from the i-stems, where the full-grade stem and the ending fused together to produce a long vowel (*-ey-es > -ēs). The Latin accusative plural ending -ēs developed regularly from *-n̥s. The dative/ablative ending -ibus had its initial -i from the i-stems.

Table 6.2 Classical Latin consonant-stem endings

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.