[B-Greek] passive morphemes
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Feb 4 07:14:38 EST 2004
At 9:14 PM -0800 2/3/04, chidi alams wrote:
>Can anyone tell me why the contractions between some the feminine Midd/Pass
>participle morphemes and the Case endings apear to be irregular in form. For
>example, acc/pl/fem participle of the verb LUW is LUOMENAS instead of
>LUOMENHS.
There's not really anything irregular here--it would be irregular if it
WERE LUOMENHS (the form of the genitive sg. fem.); perhaps your question is
"Why did this (long)alpha-sigma NOT become -HS; I think the reason would be
that (a) the acc. pl. ending is -(short)A-NS and the long-Alpha results
from loss of the intervocalic nasal -N-, and (b) this is fundamentally
different from what happens in the gen. sg. f. where the long-alpha was
original--it's the original long-alphas that tend to change to Eta (or
change in pronunciation to the sound that's represented by Eta).
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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