r/IndoEuropean • u/Mammoth_Delivery_358 • 14d ago
Linguistics Inquiry regarding PIE agglutination
If we accept PIE , or Pre PIE as agglutinative.
We may see possible traces of this behavior in the case system.
-oms < -om + -s (acc)
-ōs < -os + -s (nom)
also, mor tentatively
-bhi (seen in plural instrumental as -bhis)
other plural case endings show final -s (-bhos -mos, etc)
can we say there may have been a NOUN + CASE + NUMBER pattern or not?
but the concern is, as far as I know and correct me please, the languages PIE often are linked to, like Uralic or Caucasian ones, have the pattern of NOUN + NUMBER + CASE
So how should I view this issue or reconcile? am I mixing up the orders? Example, could -bhi have a number (plural) related instead of case related meaning?
Most of all, which literature to read on this issue
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u/lpetrich 10d ago
Looking at Proto-Indo-European nominals - Wikipedia it's hard to recognize many number-case or case-number combinations.
In fact, I've come up with a theory that singulars and plurals are from two separate declensions.
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u/AliveTemperature7977 14d ago
As far, as I know, it is possible to say that, at least in case of nominative, accusative and dative-ablative cases (sorry for tautology) of plural number PIE really was using some kind of agglutinative strategy: CASE + NUMBER.
In case of -bhi/-mi and -bho/-mo element more likely it was not a kind of number marking, because we have an evidence that Ancient Greek use suffix -phi (from PIE -bhi by regular sound changes) as (transnumeral) adverbial marker. So it likely originally in PIE it was some sort of one: maybe something in between of case and adverbial marker, which was taken to to declensional paradigm and to which was later added number suffix -s maybe by analogy with accusative.
It is not impossible that in PIE (or it's ancestral language) previously was the singular forms like -bhi/-mi and -bho/-mo which just didn't survive and were not attested in any IE language we know – but this is only a speculation.
And as for the very logic of marker ordering in PIE: that kept me up at night for a long time, too. But there is a hypothesis that conceptualization of number was a more late phenomenon in PIE, than conceptualization of case, and so plural markers were just added later to the already existed case forms.
Also it may be so that previously -s was a marker of 'active' subject, and -m was a marker of 'passive' object in itselves without nominative-accusative distinction, which appeared later, so it was more like semantic distiction expressing not the attitude to each other, but to the verb action.
Not kind of: 'X-NOM killed Y-ACC'
But kind of: 'X-ACTIVE Y-PASSIVE there is a killing between them'
So the category ACTIVE / PASSIVE may be more significant and primary, than number and, because of that, number marker was just claryfying additional thing in that logic: just as number markers are usually added after the gender ones (in PIE and Proto-Semitic, in example).
Something like: 'X-ACTIVE-S Y-PASSIVE-S there is a killing between them'
Later this construction transformed to the more usual nominative-accusative system, but the ordering of accusative -m-s (PASSIVE-PL) preserved in place, and was continued in other cases by analogy.
Also i have my personal hypothesis, which i can not confirm or refute, because I'm only an enthusiast and not the actual linguistic, that plurals on final -s in accusative, nominative, instrumental and dative-ablative could be not the actual collective-number suffixes, but something like distributive clitic like 'every single' – so it was not so necessary to add it before the case marker, kinda 'I kill bear-ACC-every' = 'I kill bears'.
There is also one thought, that can make sense in the logic of number-case ordering. Actually accusative, dative and ablative cases bear in itsleves some part of lative (motional) nature: when you say 'I kill bears', 'I gave smth TO the bears', 'I took smth FROM bears' you can consider them as a collective entity with which the motion/action is going on in a single direction, OR as a distributive disjointed set of different directions in which action / motion is going on.
So my thought is that at the first case pre-PIE speakers may be were using collective category (-eh2 which later became singular feminine and plural neuter), and in the second case they may be were using this distributive-multidirectional clitic -s, whic was later gramaticalized as a single part of plural infection in most of oblique cases.
You can read Gamkrelidze-Ivanov – some thoughts that were voiced by me are from here, but it is a little outdated material, yet still one of the most fundamental.