loss of intervocalic sigma
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Aug 30 08:45:18 EDT 2002
At 11:42 AM +0000 8/30/02, James Tauber wrote:
>On Thu, 29 Aug 2002 20:42:56 -0400, "Carl W. Conrad"
><cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> said:
>> I'm a bit (a great bit) confused by your question, particularly as
>> concerns QEOS: there's no sigma in the stem there; it's a regular
>> second-declension -O- stem and the -S is in fact the nominative sg. case
>>ending.
>
>Smyth gives the original stem of QEOS as *QESO.
>
>I did deliberate whether to just put the stem as *QEO in my database -
>it's always difficult to know how far to go back with the stem as one
>would imagine a native speaker would have just viewed the stem as *QEO
>and the form *QESO that Smyth gives is really only of historical
>(pre-Homeric?) interest.
Where did you find this in Smyth? It's in #120 (pp. 20-21), although
there's some useful info bearing on your question there. I'm really curious
about this and about the evidence for it; my impresssion is that this is
not even an Indo-European root.
Well, I may be wrong, but I really think that Smyth is wrong on this one--I
don't think there's any evidence of a stem in QES for this noun; I frankly
think that we would be seeing a declension of QEOS comparable to that of
NOUS (NOUS, NOU, NWi, NOUN although NT Koine has heteroclitic forms: NOUS,
NOOS, NOI, NOUN) or to OROS (stem ORES-): nom. OROS, gen. OROUS (<ORESOS),
dat. OREI (<ORESI), acc. OROS.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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