Toward a History of PIE N-Stems in Tocharian

Abstract

s, they were at times conflated, e.g., Tocharian B ymiye (and also yamo*?). (When used as agent nouns or as adjectives this class shows replacement of the nominative singular by the accusative.) There are other nouns of this class in both Tocharian languages which show Back Vowel Umlaut and manifest no trace of original palatalization of the root final consonant, e.g., B sopiye* net, olyiye* ship, molyiye* struggle (both with superficial palatalization of /1/ before /i/, see Adams, forthcoming), or B proskiye [ A praskil fear. It is possible that such nouns show a Proto-Indo-European *-uHen-. The loss of laryngeals left *-iHenand *-uH nas *iyenand *uwen-. At that time *-iyencould be segmented as *-i-yenrather than *-iy-enand such an analysis would lead to the replacement of *-uwenby *-uyen-. The latter develops regularly to [AB] -ibut with no palatalization of the preceding consonant and backing and rounding of any susceptible preceding vowel. A trace of the original u(H)stem may be seen in B prari finger (from *p(e)roruyen< *p(e)riruHen-) but plural nominative praroi (from *p(e)rrruHnes). Tocharian A shows this word without a n-extension, i.e., sg. prar (< *p(e)riru), pl. praru* (< *p(e)rorwd). As an adjective we have B arkwi [A arkil white, pl. nom. arkwimn (for *arkwih), pl. acc. arkwindarn, all from *arguyen(< *arguHen-, cf. Latin argatus clear, significant) with the accusative singular again as a nominative. (Proto-Indo-European *u gives Tocharian B /o/ when subject to Back Vowel Umlaut, /wd/ when absolutely initial or after /k/, and /a/ elsewhere.) 8 Except in adjective stems in -r-, the -m is (secondarily ?) lost. 9 The final -e (in Tocharian B) from Proto-Indo-European *-oH is surprising. One might more readily have expected *-a This content downloaded from 207.46.13.159 on Sat, 22 Oct 2016 04:41:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 442 Journal of the American Oriental Society 100. 4 (1980) When we turn our attention to n-stem adjectives in Tocharian, we find that, aside from small, residual examples (see notes 7 and 10), there is abundant evidence for two formerly productive types: one corresponding to our nominal class (2), and one to class (5). The evidence is most explicit for class (2) which includes several adjectives in Tocharian B and one or two in Tocharian Aall based on Proto-IndoEuropean *-mon-/-men-, e.g., Tocharian B klyomo [A klyomj noble. In Tocharian B the vowel *-6of the nominative singular has been extended throughout the masculine paradigm. In Tocharian A, though the declension has been assimilated to that of the ntstems, we see traces of Proto-Indo-European *-ein, for instance, the acc. sg. m. klyomant. The feminine in both languages is also based on ProtoIndo-European *-men-, with the addition of *-ain Tocharian A and of *-yain B, e.g., B klyomfia, A klyomi .M. Class (5) adjectives, however, appear to have been the productive declension in Proto-Tocharian and, insofar as they survive, they have become assimilated to their thematic (i.e., strong) counterparts. The usual result of this conflation of strong and weak for the masculine adjective was the retention of the strong nominative singular (i.e., no preceding palatalization) and the weak accusative singular (i.e., with preceding palatalization and, in Tocharian B, the extension of the vowel -e[from either PIE *-eor *-o-] at the expense of-a[from PIE *-e-] ). Thus, in the singular, we have the following developments: SINGULAR Proto-Tocharian Toch. Toch.