# plural marking in IE case suffixes



## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> For example, Finnish is often characterized as an agglutinative language, but some of its most common affixes, such as _-i-_ (which indicates noun plurality before most case suffixes), actually seem less agglutinative (in many respects) than certain inflectional suffixes in e.g. Latin.


But in Baltic-Finnic (and especially in Estonian) this is simply the result of phonetic changes, e. g.:
_kala-sta — *kala-ı̯-sta _"from the fish" — "from the fishes"
_kalasta — kaloista_ (Finnish)
_kalast — kalust_ (Estonian).


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> But in Baltic-Finnic (and especially in Estonian) this is simply the result of phonetic changes, e. g.:
> _kala-sta — *kala-ı̯-sta _"from the fish" — "from the fishes"
> _kalasta — kaloista_ (Finnish)
> _kalast — kalust_ (Estonian).



I wasn't referring to changes in the preceding stem vowel.

What I meant is that the -_i_- suffix marks plurality in some case forms, but not all of them:

_hevose*t*_ ("horses")
_hevos*te*n_ ("of horses")
vs.
_hevos*i*lla_ ("on/by horses")
_hevos*i*lle_ ("to horses")
etc.

Analogously, the Latin suffix _-nt _indicates a 3pl. subject in almost all verb forms (_da*nt* _"they give", _daba*nt*ur_ "they were being given", etc.), but not in the perfect indicative, where an additional_ r_-element is added (_dede*r*unt _"they gave").



> The most unusual in the Indo-European declension is the existence of three independent sets of markers for the Singular, Dual and Plural: I don't know any other family where not occasional case markers, but the entire system would be organized like this. True, we probably can trace the roots of some of these forms, e. g. the Acc. Pl. *-_ns_ looks like the Acc. Sg. *_-m_ with the pluralizing _-s,_ or the Instr. Pl. _*-bʰis,_ found in some groups, looks derived in the same manner from the Instr. S. *-_bʰi,_ present in Armenian (though in Mycenaean Greek the same ending serves for the Instr. Pl.), but overall the speakers of the earliest attested IE languages most probably didn't already perceive these case markers as related.



Especially in the case of accusative *-ns, I doubt that no connection was perceived. Consonant-declension nouns in Latin had an identical nom. and acc. plural suffix (-_ēs_), and in Greek, they differed only by the preceding vowel (nominative -_es_ vs. accusative -_as_).

Genitive plural *-_om_ has no clear connection to the corresponding singular form (unlike *-ns, *-bHis and locative *-si). But, the -_rum_ genitive pl. forms in many Latin nouns (e.g. _equorum_ "of the horses" < earlier *_equosom_) suggest the analogical influence of pluralizing -_s_ in this case as well.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> I wasn't referring to changes in the preceding stem vowel.
> 
> What I meant is that the -_i_- suffix marks plurality in some case forms, but not all of them:
> 
> _hevose*t*_ ("horses")
> _hevos*te*n_ ("of horses")
> vs.
> _hevos*i*lla_ ("on/by horses")
> _hevos*i*lle_ ("to horses")
> etc.


I see, but in any case the plurality is expressed separately from the case: by -_t_ alone in the Nom. Pl., but by -_t_- or -_i_- in Gen. Pl. (_hevosten~hevosien_) and by -_i_- elsewhere. The IE situation looks similar to the Estonian Ill. Sg. _kalla _vs. Ill. Pl. _kalu,_ though we know for sure that in Estonian this is simply the result of far-reaching phonetic changes, _*kala-sen _vs. _*kala-ı̯-sen, _whereas in PIE most endings in Sg. and Pl. are/look etymologically unrelated.



Gavril said:


> Analogously, the Latin suffix _-nt _indicates a 3pl. subject in almost all verb forms (_da*nt* _"they give", _daba*nt*ur_ "they were being given", etc.), but not in the perfect indicative, where an additional_ r_-element is added (_dede*r*unt _"they gave").



True, with one correction: in the Latin Perfect, the etymological ending is -_ēre_ (_dedēre:_ cp. Old Indic _dadur_), whereas -_nt_ was added by analogy with other tenses.



Gavril said:


> Especially in the case of accusative *-ns, I doubt that no connection was perceived. Consonant-declension nouns in Latin had an identical nom. and acc. plural suffix (-_ēs_), and in Greek, they differed only by the preceding vowel (nominative -_es_ vs. accusative -_as_).


And what should these Latin and Greek examples testify? The Latin declension has merged two types: the _i_-type originally had Nom. Pl. _-ēs_ (_<*-eı̯es_) and Acc. Pl. _-īs_ (_<*-ins_), whereas the consonantal type had the Nom. Pl. _*-es_ and the Acc. Pl. _-ēs_ (_*-ens<-n̥s_); the leveling in the _i_-stems could have acted in both directions, cp. Varro's _Dē linguā latīnā:_ VIII.XXXVII Nom. Pl. _hae puppīs restīs et hae puppēs restēs _(Varro: Lingua Latina VIII). The Greek forms are regular phonetic outcomes of the PIE ones: _-ες<*-es _and _-ας<*-n̥s_.



Gavril said:


> Genitive plural *-_om_ has no clear connection to the corresponding singular form (unlike *-ns, *-bHis and locative *-si). But, the -_rum_ genitive pl. forms in many Latin nouns (e.g. _equorum_ "of the horses" < earlier *_equosom_) suggest the analogical influence of pluralizing -_s_ in this case as well.


I don't think it could work in such a way that the pluralizing *_s_ was added _after_ the case ending in the Acc. Pl. _*-m-s_ but _before_ the case ending in the Gen. Pl. _*-s-om, _while, as you write, the speakers still were able to analyze the structure of the Accusative form. The Latin -_rum_ is cognate to the pronominal Gen. Pl. _*-som,_ found in various languages, e. g. _*toı̯-s-om:_ Sanskrit _teṣām,_ Prussian _steison,_ Old Church Slavonic_ těxъ_ and Gothic _þize, _Norse _þeira _(_>_English _their_). The origin of this -_s_- is unknown, but in the attested languages it serves as the consonantal delimiter between the stem and the vocalic ending. I don't think it was a Plural suffix since in the pronouns the Nom. Pl. was the asigmatic _*toı̯:_ Sanskrit _te,_ Greek _τοί,_ Latin _is-tī,_ Lithuanian _tie,_ Old Church Slavonic _ti,_ Gothic _þai_.


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## ahvalj

By the way, the relationship _*-bʰi_ in the Instr. Sg. vs. _-bʰis_ in the Instr. Pl. I had mentioned above may be secondary if, as it is often suggested, the preposition _ἀμφί_ etc. "on both sides, around" (ἀμφί - Wiktionary) goes indeed back to the Instr. Du./Pl. *_hₐn̥t-bʰi_ (as suggested by the Tocharian B _āntpi~antapi_) from _*hₐent-_ "face", so we only stay with the Acc. _*-m_ vs. _*-m-s_.


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## francisgranada

ahvalj said:


> The same is attested e. g. in Estonian: the Comitative -_ga_ vs. the separate preposition _kaasa_ "with" (_minuga kaasa = conmigo, _with the same element used twice), and Karelian: the Comitative _-nka_ vs. the separate preposition _kera_ "with" (_miunke = miun kera_ "with me": _aššu miunke linnah Bremenih_ "go with me to the city of Bremen" : Bremenskoit šoittajat (1936) | Karjalan Rahvahan Kirjasto, the verb is astua - Wiktionary, _-h_ is the Illative ending). In Turkish, we find _benim ile ~ benimle_ "with me", though of course it can't be a rule in the languages.


Not a rule, however the high correlation (almost 100% in Hungarian) between the number of syllables and  the postpositional vs. suffixal character of the "case markers" may - at least _partially - _suggest a possible explanation for two phenomena:

1. A possible development of a future _case ending_ (< initially _an agglutinated suffix_) from an originally independent word, i.e. postposition***_. _Thus, if such a postposition loses some syllable (for whatever reason), it becomes no more spontaneously understandable/analyzable as a separate word, i.e. it becomes "abstract" and, consequently, it's usage will depend on the preceding word (noun). The final result may be that this "corrupted postposition" will be perceived as a modifying element (> _case ending_) of the preceding word (noun). Conclusion: this mechanism demonstrates that a language "without declension" _can gradually _evolve into one "with declension" in certain circumstances.

2. A possible reason why a development from "without declension" into "with declension" happens in a  particular period. During (approximately) the 9th-12th centuries more "radical" phonetic changings took place in Hungarian, being the most important (from the point of view of this discussion) the _general loss of final vowels,_ which affected all the word classes, not especially the postpositions. Examples from 1055 A.D.: _váru > vár_ (castle); _fehérü >_ _fehér _(white); ú_tu rea_ > _útra _(onto the road); etc ... Conclusion: the process from "without declension" into "with declension" _can be_ initiated/activated by phonetic factors, i.e. the result is not the _goal _but rather the _consequence _of factors that work/operate in a certain period.

***In Hungarian, from the etymological point of view, a _postposition _is typically a kind of adverb created by adding an adequate suffix to an other word (e.g. noun), consequently it mostly consists of more than one syllable.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> I see, but in any case the plurality is expressed separately from the case: by -_t_ alone in the Nom. Pl., but by -_t_- or -_i_- in Gen. Pl. (_hevosten~hevosien_)



Note that the _-e_- in -_ten_/-_ien_ is also unexpected on a purely agglutinative analysis: the genitive singular is simply -_n_.



> and by -_i_- elsewhere. The IE situation looks similar to the Estonian Ill. Sg. _kalla _vs. Ill. Pl. _kalu,_ though we know for sure that in Estonian this is simply the result of far-reaching phonetic changes, _*kala-sen _vs. _*kala-ı̯-sen, _whereas in PIE most endings in Sg. and Pl. are/look etymologically unrelated.



Other than genitive plural *-_om_, all the other plural endings in IE look like a fusion of a singular case ending plus pluralizing *-_s: _accusative_ *-m-s, _dative/instrumental _*-bHi-s / *-ōi-s, _locative_ *-s-i / *-s-u. _Are there any more obscure cases than these?

The difference between gen. pl. *-_om_ and gen. sg. *-_os_ suggests an old semantic differentiation between individual and collective possession. In Armenian, a somewhat similar distinction is made between the genitive case (Հրաչի [_Hrači_] "of/belonging to Hrach") versus the group-possessive suffix (Հրաչենց [_Hračents_] "of Hrach's family").



> And what should these Latin and Greek examples testify?



That the common -_s_ element in nom. and acc. plural was readily perceivable in both cases. In the case of Latin, this commonality may have been a factor in the merging of the nom. and acc. pl. consonant declension endings.



> I don't think it could work in such a way that the pluralizing *_s_ was added _after_ the case ending in the Acc. Pl. _*-m-s_ but _before_ the case ending in the Gen. Pl. _*-s-om, _while, as you write, the speakers still were able to analyze the structure of the Accusative form.



It may not have happened this way, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't have -- affix-ordering is not always a perfectly stable process. (Witness the IE locative plural *-_si_/*-_su_, where the *_s_ precedes the case marker,  versus acc. pl. *-_ns,_ where it follows it.)


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> Note that the _-e_- in -_ten_/-_ien_ is also unexpected on a purely agglutinative analysis: the genitive singular is simply -_n_.


As far as I understand, both _i_ and _t_ as Plural markers go back to Proto-Uralic or at least to one of its daughter lineages. In Baltic-Finnic, the distribution of both formants may vary, e. g. in Standard Estonian, following the situation in north Estonian dialects, the nouns normally have _-t->-d-_ throughout the Plural (I don't remember the details, but the short forms (<*_i_) were reintroduced in the 19th century after southern and Finnish examples for esthetic reasons to avoid the endless -_de_- syllables, and the distribution _d/*i_ in the oblique cases of the Plural was finally regulated almost artificially only in the 1920's).

It is hard to decide whether the Estonian _-de-_ is extracted from _-t-en,_ or the Gen. _-n_ is attached to the original _-te-_. In any case, _*-t-n_ was phonetically impossible, so it isn't a real violation of the agglutination principles.

I have checked the distribution by languages, and it turns out that -_ien_ should have come from _*-i-te-n:_ Vepsian, the only Baltic-Finnic language that doesn't drop the intervocalic consonants, has _kaloidʲen, lambhidʲen_ vs. the Finnish _kalojen~kalain_ (<_*kala-i-te-n~kala-te-n_) and _lampaiden~lampaitten~lammasten_ (<*_lampase-i-te-n~lampase-te-n_).



Gavril said:


> Other than genitive plural *-_om_, all the other plural endings in IE look like a fusion of a singular case ending plus pluralizing *-_s: _accusative_ *-m-s, _dative/instrumental _*-bHi-s / *-ōi-s, _locative_ *-s-i / *-s-u. _Are there any more obscure cases than these? That the common -_s_ element in nom. and acc. plural was readily perceivable in both cases.


The interpretation of almost any _-s_ as a Plural marker is not impossible but far from substantiated: actually, I would say there is no positive evidence for that. The situation across languages looks far from clear. The Dative Plural is _*-bʰo_>_-bo _in Gaulish, _*-bʰos_ in Celtiberian, Lepontian and Venetic (_-bos_) as well as in Latin (-_bus_), _-bʰı̯os_ in Indo-Iranic (_-bhyas, -byō_), _-mus_ (!) in Old Lithuanian (> modern _-ms~-m_) and_ -mans _(!) in Prussian; the attested Slavic form -_mъ_ can come from both _*-mas_ and _*-mus_ (the former is excluded if the _-e_ of the thematic masc. Nom. Sg. in north-western Old East Slavic is phonetically derived from _*-as_). The Instrumental Plural is _*-bʰi>-bi_ in Gaulish and _-φι_ in Mycenaean, *-_bʰis_ in Armenian (_-vk'_), Old Indic (_-bhiṣ_) and Avestan (_-biš_) and >_*-miz_ in Germanic (Old English Dat. Pl. _þǣm<*þāmi<*þaimiz_), but _*-bʰīs>-bīs _in Latin (_nōbīs, vōbīs_) and >_*-mīs_ in Balto-Slavic (actually, we can't tell whether the Slavic -_mi_ comes from a form with or without the final _*-s_). The Locative Pl. is _-su_ everywhere but Greek, so it is unknown whether _-σι_ is the original form or a merger of the Loc. Sg. -_i_ × Loc. Pl. _-su: _if it is original, what is -_u_ in the Plural?



Gavril said:


> It may not have happened this way, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't have -- affix-ordering is not always a perfectly stable process. (Witness the IE locative plural *-_si_/*-_su_, where the *_s_ precedes the case marker,  versus acc. pl. *-_ns,_ where it follows it.)


I can recall only one example of this in one paradigm: the Erzyan formant of the demonstrative declension is placed before the case endings in Gen. Sg., Dat. Sg. and the Pl. but after them in the rest of the Sg., e. g. Elative Sg. _uma-sto-ntʲ _vs. Elative Pl. _uma-t-neʲ-ste _(_ума/uma_ "corral"). This can only be explained if these two sets were formed at different periods.

By the way, as an afterthought, which reasons do we have to regard _*s_ as the Plural marker in PIE? In the masculine declension, it is almost always present in both the Nom. Sg. (*-_s_) and the Nom. Pl. (*_-es_), whereas in the demonstrative and relative pronouns we find *-_s_ in the Nom. Sg. but _not_ in the Nom. Pl. (e. g. "which" — Nom. Sg. _*ı̯os:_ Sanskrit _yaḥ,_ Phrygian _ios_, Greek _ὅς, _Lithuanian _jis_ vs. Nom. Pl. _*ı̯oı̯:_ Sanskrit _ye,_ Greek _οἴ, _Lithuanian _jie_).


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> dative/instrumental _*-bHi-s / *-ōi-s_


The thematic Dat. Sg. _-ōı̯_ comes from the contraction of _*-o-eı̯_ (the _o_-stem + the usual Dat. Sg. ending), whereas the Instr. Pl. (it is Dat. Pl. only in Greek and Latin and both languages don't have the separate Instrumental case) _-ōı̯s_ seems to have come from *_-o-īs_ (the _o_-stem + the same -_īs_ as in the Latin and Balto-Slavic Instr. Pl. endings). In Lithuanian, the former corresponds to _-ui _(<_*uoi<*-ōi_), whereas the latter to _-ais _(_vyrui : vyrais_), suggesting that the long vowel was _*ō_ in the Dat. Sg. but *_ī_ in the Instr. Pl.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> It is hard to decide whether the Estonian _-de-_ is extracted from _-t-en,_ or the Gen. _-n_ is attached to the original _-te-_. In any case, _*-t-n_ was phonetically impossible, so it isn't a real violation of the agglutination principles.



That depends on how you define these principles. Is it more "agglutinative" to insert a vowel to break up a cluster (and if so, why specifically -_e_-?) than to let the cluster be simplified into a single consonant or similar?

Pure agglutinativity also doesn't seem to account for the genitive plural -_iden_ in long-vowel stems (_maa_ "land", _maiden_ "of lands"), where the -_i_- was added later on analogy of other plural suffixes, even though -_den_ "should have" been enough to signify genetive plural.



> The interpretation of almost any _-s_ as a Plural marker is not impossible but far from substantiated: actually, I would say there is no positive evidence for that.



The presence of -_s_ in all plural affixes except the genitive (on which see the paragraph I added to the last post) seems like quite a bit of positive evidence to me.

The fact that there is variation in the suffixal vowel (Latin -_b*u*s_ versus Armenian *-_bH*i*s_, etc.) -- maybe due to analogy with the endings of different stem classes --, and the fact that -_s_ seems to be missing from some suffixes in Mycenaean Greek and (sparsely-attested) Gaulish, does not take much away from the strength of the positive evidence.

I don't mean any offense in saying this, but I've noticed a tendency in IE linguistics (at least where morphology is concerned) to resist solutions that involve simplification, in favor of keeping everything at an irreducible level of intricate complexity. An example of this is the claim that the Latin consonant declension nom. pl. -_ēs_ is taken from the i-stem nom. pl., rather than being due to a levelling of the (already very similar) nom./acc. plural endings in the consonant declension itself. The idea that -_s_ just happens to show up in almost all the plural case suffixes, and never actually had the semantic value of plurality (irrespective of case), also seems in line with this tendency.



> The Locative Pl. is _-su_ everywhere but Greek, so it is unknown whether _-σι_ is the original form or a merger of the Loc. Sg. -_i_ × Loc. Pl. _-su: _if it is original, what is -_u_ in the Plural?



Maybe a replacement vowel for *-_i, _to avoid confusion with other case forms? The form *-_si_ could have been confused with, e.g., the _i-_stem neuter nom./acc. sg. It might be relevant that Greek, which has oblique plural -_si, _also has very few if any neuter _i-_stem nouns.



> By the way, as an afterthought, which reasons do we have to regard _*s_ as the Plural marker in PIE?



The fact that it appears in almost all plural case affixes, except for the neuter nom./acc. plural *-_a _(which, if I'm not mistaken, is thought to have originally had special collective semantics) and gen. pl. *-om (which may also have originally had different semantics). The nom. pl. endings *-_oi_ and *-_ai_ for the vocalic stems (based on Latin, Greek etc.) are thought to be later generalizations from demonstrative pronouns.



> whereas in the demonstrative and relative pronouns we find -_s_ in the Nom. Sg. but _not_ in the Nom. Pl. (e. g. "which" — Nom. Sg. _*ı̯os:_ Sanskrit _yaḥ,_ Phrygian _ios_, Greek _ὅς, _Lithuanian _jis_ vs. Nom. Pl. _*ı̯oı̯:_ Sanskrit _ye,_ Greek _οἴ, _Lithuanian _jie_)



Pronouns often seem to have a distinct expression of plurality compared to normal nouns. E.g. in Finnish there is an alternation between singular_ s-/t_- (_se_ "it, that", _tämä_ "this") versus plural _n_- (_ne_ "they, those", _nämä_ "these"), and a recurring -_e _element in the plural personal pronouns (_me_ "we", _te_ "you (pl.)", _he_ "they"). Whatever their origin, neither of these patterns has any parallel in the plurals of regular nouns.


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## ahvalj

ahvalj said:


> The thematic Dat. Sg. _-ōı̯_ comes from the contraction of _*-o-eı̯_ (the _o_-stem + the usual Dat. Sg. ending), whereas the Instr. Pl. (it is Dat. Pl. only in Greek and Latin and both languages don't have the separate Instrumental case) _-ōı̯s_ seems to have come from *_-o-īs_ (the _o_-stem + the same -_īs_ as in the Latin and Balto-Slavic Instr. Pl. endings). In Lithuanian, the former corresponds to _-ui _(<_*uoi<*-ōi_), whereas the latter to _-ais _(_vyrui : vyrais_), suggesting that the long vowel was _*ō_ in the Dat. Sg. but *_ī_ in the Instr. Pl.


This scenario seems to agree with the Latin and Greek evidence as well: the Dat. Sg. forms are _-ō_ and _-ωι_ but the Instr. Pl. ones are _-īs_ and _-οις _instead of **_-ōs_ and **-_ωις_. In Lithuanian, both the Instr. Pl. -_aĩs_ (<*_-o-ihₓs_) and the Optative Sg. 3. -_iẽ (<*-oihₑ)_ have the circumflex intonation vs. the acute -_ái_ (<*_-ehₐ-i_) in the old Loc. Sg of the _ā_-stems attested in the form of the above _šakáipi_. What remains without explanation, is the discrepancy in Indo-Iranic: we find -_āis_ in Avestan and -_ais_ (<*-_āis_) in Old Indic in the Instr. Pl. vs. -_ai_- in Avestan and -_e_- (<*-_ai_-) in Old Indic in the thematic optative, cp. the Sanskrit _vṛkaiṣ_ (<*_u̯l̥kʷoihₓs_) vs. _bhareḥ_ (<*_bʰeroihₑs_).


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> The fact that there is variation in the suffixal vowel (Latin -_b*u*s_ versus Armenian *-_bH*i*s_, etc.)


Latin _-bus_ may be explained as the Dative/Ablative form, while _-bīs_ as the Instrumental one. Isn't the parallel of _nōbīs : nami_ and _vōbīs : vami_ convincing?

We don't know whether forms with the short _i_ in *_-bʰi(s)_ go back to *-_bʰhₓi_- or not: there is absolutely no way to evaluate it. In the Leiden slavistics, the postconsonantal laryngeal is postulated in the cases when the authors need to _lengthen_ the following vowel without causing the acute intonation, e. g. to explain the stress in the Slavic _pīlā̋_ (Nom. Sg. fem. of the _l_-Participle), they reconstruct its prototype as _*phₒi-lehₐ_ since the old acute lengths retracted the stress from the next syllable, e. g. Slavic _grī̋vā _and Latvian _grĩva_ vs. the Sanskrit _grīvā́_ (this is not necessary in the framework of the Moscow accentological school that postulates two tones in PIE and Balto-Slavic, of which only the dominant tone on the acute vowels retracted the stress). If Leiden slavists are right, _*-bʰhₓis>*-mīs_ should have been circumflex in Balto-Slavic, while in reality it is acute (shortened in Lithuanian, the circumflex length would have preserved as **-_mys_). Otherwise, you should postulate _-bʰhₓi-_ in some languages vs. _-bʰihₓ_- in others, which adds ambiguity since the PIE *_i_ doesn't disappear as *_e/o_.



Gavril said:


> I don't mean any offense in saying this, but I've noticed a tendency in IE linguistics (at least where morphology is concerned) to resist solutions that involve simplification, in favor of keeping everything at an irreducible level of intricate complexity. An example of this is the claim that the Latin consonant declension nom. pl. -_ēs_ is taken from the i-stem nom. pl., rather than being due to a levelling of the (already very similar) nom./acc. plural endings in the consonant declension itself. The idea that -_s_ just happens to show up in almost all the plural case suffixes, and never actually had the semantic value of plurality (irrespective of case), also seems in line with this tendency.


This is a measure to prevent proliferation of unsubstantiated ideas: any phenomenon may have various explanations, most of which are impossible to verify. May I mention Occam's razor?

In Oscan the Nom. Pl. in the _i_-stems is _-is_ (<_*-eı̯es_) vs. _-s~∅_ (<*_-es_) in the consonant ones, e. g. _aídilis_ "aedilēs" vs. _humuns_ "hominēs", _kvaízstur_ "quaestōrēs"; in Umbrian we find -_es_ vs. -∅: _puntes_ vs. _frater_ "frātrēs" (_Pisani V · 1953 · Le lingue dell’Italia antica oltre il latino:_ 13, 15–16; also see here: A Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian), so no confusion of two declension types took place in that branch. The consonantal Acc. Pl. seems to have been -_s_ in Oscan and -_f_ in Umbrian (the next page at the web-link), which look leveled after the Nom. Pl., i. e. in the direction opposite of the Latin one. Yet, I fail to understand why such a development may be important in the context of the present discussion.

The overal idea of the confusion of _i_- and consonantal stem declensions in Latin is based on the facts of that language: we find frequent cases of an apocope of -_i_- in the Nom. Sg. [cp. _pars_ vs. Gen. Pl. _partium_], the Gen. Sg. ending in both is _-is,_ not _**-īs,_ the Acc. Sg. _-im_ and Abl. Sg. _-ī_ are preserved in the selected words, Dat./Abl. Pl. _-ibus_ obviously comes from the _i_-stems etc. Why should the Nom. Pl. _-ēs_ be regarded separately?



Gavril said:


> Maybe a replacement vowel for *-_i, _to avoid confusion with other case forms? The form *-_si_ could have been confused with, e.g., the _i-_stem neuter nom./acc. sg. It might be relevant that Greek, which has oblique plural -_si, _also has very few if any neuter _i-_stem nouns.


All languages (but Italic) have very few neuter _i_-nouns. Not important for the present topic, but just for the record: the classical Greek -_σι_ is extracted from consonantal (and especially -_s_-) stems, since the intervocalic -_s_- is regularly dropped, cp. in Homeric: Loc.>Dat. Sg. _*genes-i>γένεϊ_ vs. Loc.>Dat. Pl. _*genes-si>γένεσσι_.



Gavril said:


> The fact that it appears in almost all plural case affixes, except for the neuter nom./acc. plural *-_a _(which, if I'm not mistaken, is thought to have originally had special collective semantics) and gen. pl. *-om (which may also have originally had different semantics). The nom. pl. endings *-_oi_ and *-_ai_ for the vocalic stems (based on Latin, Greek etc.) are thought to be later generalizations from demonstrative pronouns. Pronouns often seem to have a distinct expression of plurality compared to normal nouns. E.g. in Finnish there is an alternation between singular_ s-/t_- (_se_ "it, that", _tämä_ "this") versus plural _n_- (_ne_ "they, those", _nämä_ "these"), and a recurring -_e _element in the plural personal pronouns (_me_ "we", _te_ "you (pl.)", _he_ "they"). Whatever their origin, neither of these patterns has any parallel in the plurals of regular nouns.


Could you explain why -_s_ in the Nom. Sg. *_hₒeu̯i-s_ "sheep" and *_suhₓnu-s_ "son" and the Gen. Sg. _*hₒeu̯ı̯-es_ and _*suhₓneu̯-s_ weren't perceived as pluralizers, whereas in the Nom. Pl. *_hₒeu̯eı̯-es_ and *_suhₓneu̯-es_ they were, and why the presence of -_s_ in the Gen. Sg. vs. its absence in the Gen. Pl. (_*hₒeu̯ı̯om, *suhₓneu̯om_), the most frequent oblique case, didn't disturb the system? Lithuanian still has all these endings (_avis, sūnus, avies, sunaus, avys, sūnūs;_ in the Acc. _avį : avis, sūnų — sūnus;_ in the Instr. _avimi : avimis, sūnumi : sūnumis_) but its speakers don't associate -_s_ with the Plural at all.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> Latin_-bus_ may be explained as the Dative/Ablative form, while _-bīs_ as the Instrumental one.



My mistake: a more relevant pair for the point I was trying to make (vowel irregularities in the suffixes) would be Latin -_bus_ < *-_b*o*s_ versus Lithuanian -_m*u*s_.



> This is a measure to prevent proliferation of unsubstantiated ideas: any phenomenon may have various explanations, most of which are impossible to verify. May I mention Occam's razor?



How is it more substantiated that consonantal nom. pl. -_ēs _in Latin is based on the i-stem nom. pl., than that it is due to a merger with the acc. pl. (just as happened in the _u_-stems, for example)?

Edit: I just saw that you added another paragraph about this. Other than the -_i_- of -_ibus_, all the examples you cite seem to be cases of the consonant stems influencing i-stems rather than vice versa.

Also, if Ockham's Razor errs on the side of simpler explanations, then how does denying the plural semantics of IE *-s decrease complexity, rather than increase it? It seems simpler to say that the *-s appearing in all but one of the plural case suffixes has a single origin.



> Could you explain why -_s_ in the Nom. Sg. *_hₒeu̯i-s_ "sheep" and *_suhₓnu-s_ "son" and the Gen. Sg. _*hₒeu̯ı̯-es_ and _*suhₓneu̯-s_ weren't perceived as pluralizers, whereas in the Nom. Pl. *_hₒeu̯eı̯-es_ and *_suhₓneu̯-es_ they were



The reason for the similarity of nom. sg. *-s, gen. sg. *-(o/e)s and plural *-s is a worthwhile question. But once all of these *-s suffixes were established and coexisted in IE, I don't think we should expect IE speakers to have confused their function any more than we should expect (for example) English speakers to misinterpret familiar words ending in an "s" or "z" sound (_si*z*e_, _cau*s*e_, _eclip*s*e, _etc_._) as plural or genitive forms.



> , and why the presence of -_s_ in the Gen. Sg. vs. its absence in the Gen. Pl. (_*hₒeu̯ı̯om, *suhₓneu̯om_), the most frequent oblique case, didn't disturb the system?



One possible factor that occurs to me: unlike the accusative/dative/etc., the genitive is an adnominal case (i.e. it connects nouns to other nouns). It is used with verbs/prepositions in some languages as well, but its adnominal usage is probably what makes it the most common oblique case. This means that the distribution of the genitive is different from that of other cases, and this in turn may lessen the potential influence of these other cases on the form of the genitive, and vice versa.



> Lithuanian still has all these endings (_avis, sūnus, avies, sunaus, avys, sūnūs;_ in the Acc. _avį : avis, sūnų — sūnus;_ in the Instr. _avimi : avimis, sūnumi : sūnumis_) but its speakers don't associate -_s_ with the Plural at all.



I may not be interprering your list correctly, but how does it support a non-association of -s with plurality for Lithuanian speakers? Examples like _avį_ : _avis_ and _sūnumi_ : _sūnumis_ suggest that such an association is easily inferrable.

By the way, I think this discussion is off the original topic: I've requested that it be split off into a new thread.


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## ahvalj

I have met similar interpretations concerning modern French several times and I think Western Romance (Spanish and Portuguese in their own ways) is evolving towards incorporating the clitics into the "grammatical words". What still prevents describing the aspects of the French verb you have mentioned as semi-agglutinative ones is the remaining possibility to move the constituting elements within the grammatical forms, like e. g. in the interrogatives: _typarl/parlty?, vuparle/parlevu?, ʐeparle/eʐparle? _etc.: not that the true agglutinative languages don't know this at all, but still the French mobility of these elements is too high to make this interpretation more didactically advantageous.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> However, Lithuanian speakers don't analyze these endings as compound ones: they simply know that _avimì, sūnumì_ are the forms used for the Instrumental Singular and _avimìs, sūnumìs_ for the Instrumental Plural, without isolating an Instrumental format -_mi_- (especially since other declension types don't follow this pattern. e.g. _výru — výrais, mergà — mergomìs_).



This is probably tangential, but how do you draw the above conclusion about how Lith. speakers understand their words' morphology? I don't presume to know even how other English speakers segment the words they hear/read. All I can say is that the data people are exposed to provide a better basis for some inferences (such as "s = plural" on the basis of most nouns) than for others (such as "-th = plural" on the basis of words like _teeth_)_. _Although Lithuanian inst. pl. endings may vary between _-mis _and_ -ais, _this doesn't prevent speakers from recognizing _-s _as a common factor in both.



> Loc.: _*suhₓn-eu̯-i~*suhₓn-ēu̯ — *suhₓn-u-su:_ _s_ in the Pl. but in the "wrong" place (the only instance of this position in the entire declension), plus the interpretation relies on the unattested Sg. **-_u_ and the insecure Greek _-σι:_ for an unbiased observer, the endings of the Sg. and Pl. look unrelated



Despite the discrepancy between *-_i_ in the singular vs. *-_u_ in the plural, I don't see how any bias is required to suspect a connection between the *-s in this plural form and the *-s in the nom./acc./oblique plurals.

The following scenario might account for the forms that we see the loc. pl. suffix in:

1. The loc. pl. starts out as **-_*is*_ (case suffix + pluralizer)
2. This *-_is _looks too much like a nom. sg. form (_i_-stem) for some speakers; thus a deictic marker _-u _(cf. Latin _*u*bi_ "where") comes to be used for disambiguation, giving
*-_*isu*_ [possibly visible in the o-stem loc. plural form *-_oisu_ > Slavic *_ěxЪ_]
3. In athematic nouns, the *_i_- of *-_isu_ is dropped, in keeping with the prevailing pattern of monosyllabic case-affixes, thus giving *-*su.*

This is speculative, but it isn't clearly more so than the idea you presented about the vocative and nominative plural, and it has the advantage of not requiring a separate explanation for the *-_s_ in this suffix.



> The affixment of _*-bʰi_ to the Instr. Pl. in Mycenaean and Gaulish and to Instr. Sg. in Armenian and Balto-Slavic (+ see the Lithuanian problem above: if it is ancient, then only in Armenian and Slavic) doesn't allow to deduce which is the original value of this formant: Sg., Pl. or simply postpositional. The Dat. Pl. has _-s_ everywhere but in Gaulish, yet the fact that the Gauls were less successful in producing written record than the Greeks or Romans doesn't make the evidence of that language less relevant (_-bo_ is attested in a number of inscriptions).



But it does make it harder to assess whether the lack of *-_s _in -_bo_ is secondary, whether it coexisted alongside forms that did have *-s, etc. That said, the use of -_phi_ in older Greek does suggest that *-_bH-_ might have originally been an enclitic that didn't vary between singular and plural.



> In any case, where is the Dat. Sg. **_-bʰo_? Yes, we have Old Latin _sibei,_ Oscan _sífeí,_ Prussian _sebbei,_ Slavic _sebě,_ Old Indic _tubhyam,_ Avestan _taibya~taibyō,_ yet these are two personal pronouns, and the final vowels don't agree



The -o- of *-bHo- may have been a development (a disambiguation?) that came after the *-bH- suffix began to be specialized to the plural. This specialization never seems to have happened in Greek/Armenian, and there is no reason I know of to think that *-bH- was an exclusively plural suffix from the beginning.



> Then it seems to have stopped, and the presence of -_s_ in some other Pl. forms doesn't fit the pattern Pl.=Sg.+_s_… Your turn.



They don't exactly fit this pattern, but should we expect them to? There has pretty clearly been some "shuffling of functions" in the oblique case suffixes over the history of IE -- for example, *-bH- only survives in the singular in modern Armenian, but only in the plural in Latin, Irish, etc. It isn't surprising that plural *-s would attach to a variety of different bases, not always identical to those seen in the singular. And it still seems needlessly complicated to insist on a separate origin for the *-s seen in nom./acc. pl. versus the *-s seen in oblique plural suffixes.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> This is probably tangential, but how do you draw the above conclusion about how Lith. speakers understand their words' morphology? I don't presume to know even how other English speakers segment the words they hear/read. All I can say is that the data people are exposed to provide a better basis for some inferences (such as "s = plural" on the basis of most nouns) than for others (such as "-th = plural" on the basis of words like _teeth_)_. _Although Lithuanian inst. pl. endings may vary between _-mis _and_ -ais, _this doesn't prevent speakers from recognizing _-s _as a common factor in both.



The evidence that the speakers' mind or subconsciousness is able to isolate a certain element comes from the ability of that element to produce newer forms, e. g. in children's speech or in cases like _hobbitses_. The _-s_ we are discussing hasn't been active in Lithuanian since the PIE period (i. e. all the endings that have _-s_ in modern Lithuanian come from PIE: at least, I can't recall any contradicting case), and when Old Lithuanian needed to develop Pl. forms of its new locational cases, it didn't use this _s,_ but instead added the postpositions to the preexisting Pl. case forms (can't link to the post # since it will change when the thread gets officially split). Likewise, I can't recall examples in other inflexional IE languages: in contrast, when e. g. the thematic Nom. Pl. *-_ōs_ was extended to *-_ōses_ in Old Indic and perhaps in Ingaevonic Germanic (plural inflections in Germanic languages), this extension only happened in that case form, not even in the Acc. Pl. So, even if the _-s_ element during some period acted as a pluralizer in PIE, it is only discernible now from two-three petrified case endings. I really even don't understand why are you arguing about my Lithuanian examples.




Gavril said:


> Despite the discrepancy between *-_i_ in the singular vs. *-_u_ in the plural, I don't see how any bias is required to suspect a connection between the *-s in this plural form and the *-s in the nom./acc./oblique plurals.
> 
> The following scenario might account for the forms that we see the loc. pl. suffix in:
> 
> 1. The loc. pl. starts out as **-_*is*_ (case suffix + pluralizer)
> 2. This *-_is _looks too much like a nom. sg. form (_i_-stem) for some speakers; thus a deictic marker _-u _(cf. Latin _*u*bi_ "where") comes to be used for disambiguation, giving
> *-_*isu*_ [possibly visible in the o-stem loc. plural form *-_oisu_ > Slavic *_ěxЪ_]
> 3. In athematic nouns, the *_i_- of *-_isu_ is dropped, in keeping with the prevailing pattern of monosyllabic case-affixes, thus giving *-*su.*
> 
> This is speculative, but it isn't clearly more so than the idea you presented about the vocative and nominative plural, and it has the advantage of not requiring a separate explanation for the *-_s_ in this suffix.



OK, but one can build such scenarios _ad infinitum_. What to do with them? Just as another exercise (I don't suggest it seriously): imagine that the real Pl. marker was some vowel, and the Dat. Sg. was _**-bʰos_ vs. the Dat. Pl. _**-bʰosa,_ then, like in French, the final consonants were dropped at some period, and the language received the Dat. Sg. _**-bʰo_ vs. the Dat. Pl. _**-bʰosa;_ during the next turn of reduction, the final _**-a_ was dropped, producing _**-bʰo_ : _**-bʰos_ (cp. the modern French _ʐwajø _(masc.)_ : ʐwajøz _(fem.) "merry"). The PIE reconstructions should accumulate the evidence of the daughter lineages and allow only those internal explanations that are reasonably simple and straightforward. The rest should be separated from the proper reconstructions and be confined to the cloud of hypotheses: like with the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers ("everything is water", no: "everything consists of atoms"), some of these myriads of insights may casually turn out right with time and their authors may then be credited as real visionaries.



Gavril said:


> They don't exactly fit this pattern, but should we expect them to? There has pretty clearly been some "shuffling of functions" in the oblique case suffixes over the history of IE -- for example, *-bH- only survives in the singular in modern Armenian, but only in the plural in Latin, Irish, etc. It isn't surprising that plural *-s would attach to a variety of different bases, not always identical to those seen in the singular. And it still seems needlessly complicated to insist on a separate origin for the *-s seen in nom./acc. pl. versus the *-s seen in oblique plural suffixes.


So, eventually, how many case endings fit your assumption?


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> The evidence that the speakers' mind or subconsciousness is able to isolate a certain element comes from the ability of that element to produce newer forms, e. g. in children's speech or in cases like _hobbitses_.



I take a more minimal approach to evidence like this: plural forms like _boxeses_, _handses_ etc. are evidence that the affix -s is *sometimes* inferred and generalized (through force of frequency) to places where it seems redundant, and the results of this process sometimes spread to other speakers who were not responsible for the original derivations.

I think we probably have different views on what an "inflectional system" ultimately is: e.g. I don't think that inflectional affixes exist independently of the lexicon, or that there is a well-defined line between inflection and derivation. We don't have to debate this question here, but maybe this difference in our approaches accounts for some of our disagreement.



> So, eventually, how many case endings fit your assumption?



If I understand what you mean, all of the plural case endings except the genitive pl. (which lacks -s) fit my assumption. I speculated earlier that the contrast between gen. sg. *-os/*-es and gen. pl. *-om may point to an old semantic divide between individual and collective possession, which has at least rough parallels in attested languages today.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> If I understand what you mean, all of the plural case endings except the genitive pl. (which lacks -s) fit my assumption. I speculated earlier that the contrast between gen. sg. *-os/*-es and gen. pl. *-om may point to an old semantic divide between individual and collective possession, which has at least rough parallels in attested languages today.


I am afraid I am repeating myself, but I seriously don't understand why don't you see that postulating the "plural" meaning of _s_ requires (a) the existence of a greater number of pairs where the Plural form with _s_ would be opposed to a recognizably cognate Singular one without and (b) the absence (or a different origin) of _s_ used in non-plural contexts. 

I agree (and our discussion began with this) that the Acc. Pl. form looks derived from the Acc. Sg. one by means of this _-s._ I then mentioned that the Voc. Pl. (the actual Nom. Pl.) looks derived from its Sg. counterpart as well, but the presence of -_s_ at the end of (in Nom., Dat./Abl. and Instr.) or inside (in the Loc.) other case markers (except Gen.) in many (but not all !) languages can be indicative of the plural meaning of this _-s_ only if you explain:

(1) the presence of the obviously non-plural _-s_ in the Nom. Sg. and Gen. Sg. (which may have been etymologically the same case, but this most probably predated the formation of the Plural case endings, so it shouldn't be relevant; by the way, the Nom. Pl. with its _-es_ also looks originally or secondarily related to these two) and the Gen. Du. (Sanskrit _dváyos _: Lithuanian _dvíejaus _"of two");

(2) why aren't the Dat. Sg. and Abl. Sg. forms similar to the Plural ones, and why the Instr. Sg. form has so complicated and ambiguous relationships with the Pl. one;

(3) the role of _-s-_ in the pronominal declension, e. g. in the feminine Gen. Sg. Gothic _þizos_ : Sanskrit _tasyās_ "of this" and Dat. Sg. Gothic _þizai_ : Sanskrit _tasyai _"to this" (the modern German Gen./Dat. Sg. _der_ comes from here).​P. S. The moderator has already eliminated one topic today, so he looks active: has he explained why he didn't move the requested posts to this thread?


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> I am afraid I am repeating myself, but I seriously don't understand why don't you see that postulating the "plural" meaning of _s_ requires (a) the existence of a greater number of pairs where the Plural form with _s_ would be opposed to a recognizably cognate Singular one without and (b) the absence (or a different origin) of _s_ used in non-plural contexts.



I don't accept a or b. There is a middle ground between absolutely regular agglutination (something that even purportedly agglutinative languages don't necessarily display) and irreducibly irregular fusional inflection.

As I said, the oblique case suffixes in IE seem to have been affected by re-shuffling (perhaps when IE was breaking up into dialects), leading to various kinds of irregularity, such as the fact that the *-bH- suffixes only exist in the plural in some languages. This in no way means that a more regular element, such as plural *-s, cannot be maintained in the midst of this irregularity.

A roughly parallel example: the English past tense form _brought _contains a regular past-tense suffix attached to an ablauted form of the verb _bring. _Here, two different degrees of regularity co-exist, rather than one eliminating the other.

A counterexample to the principle of your point B (if I understand it right) is the use of _-t _in Finnish as a marker of nom./acc. plural in common nouns (_hevoset_ "horses") and of accusativity in the personal pronouns (_minut_ "me", _heidät_ "them", etc.). These two -_t_s may or may not have the same origin.



> (1) the presence of the obviously non-plural _-s_ in the Nom. Sg. and Gen. Sg. (which may have been etymologically the same case, but this most probably predated the formation of the Plural case endings, so it shouldn't be relevant; by the way, the Nom. Pl. with its _-es_ also looks originally or secondarily related to these two) and the Gen. Du. (Sanskrit _dváyos _: Lithuanian _dvíejaus _"of two");​



Pluralizing -s may predate the -s in the gen. sg. and nom. sg. suffixes, or vice versa. Also, they may all have converged from more distinct origins. I remember reading a theory once that nom. sg. *-_s _is originally from encliticized *_so_ "that". If there is any merit to this idea, then we have nom. sg. **-_so_, gen. sg. *-_os_/-_es_, and pluralizing *-s. These are no easier to confuse with one another than e.g. Finnish pluralizing suffix -_t_ and partitive suffix _-ta_.



> (2) why aren't the Dat. Sg. and Abl. Sg. forms similar to the Plural ones, and why the Instr. Sg. form has so complicated and ambiguous relationships with the Pl. one;



See the 2nd paragraph of this post.



> (3) the role of _-s-_ in the pronominal declension, e. g. in the feminine Gen. Sg. Gothic _þizos_ : Sanskrit _tasyās_ "of this" and Dat. Sg. Gothic _þizai_ : Sanskrit _tasyai _"to this" (the modern German Gen./Dat. Sg. _der_ comes from here).



I don't know the origin of this *-s, but I don't see how it bears on the question of pluralizing *-s in regular nouns.

Maybe the pronominal *-s was originally a genitive suffix (*-os) which was then reinforced by another genitive suffix (because pronouns, as monosyllabic words, were otherwise harder to parse into stem + suffix).

Once it was interpreted as part of the stem, this -s could have then been extended into other pronominal case forms. Something like this may have happened with Finnish plural personal pronouns: e.g. _meidät_ "us" (acc.) has the same form as the gen. _meidän_ "our", but this -_dä-_ element is missing in other case forms of the pronoun.​


> P. S. The moderator has already eliminated one topic today, so he looks active: has he explained why he didn't move the requested posts to this thread?



I sent a second request over a day ago, but I haven't heard anything.


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## ahvalj

I can only repeat what I had written in an earlier post: one can build such complicated scenarios _ad infinitum:_ the problem is that their number is virtually unlimited, and two persons (including the author himself at different periods of his life) will never agree with each other simply because there is no way to evaluate these ideas. The reconstructions will only remain scientific if they don't dare to explain more than follows from the evidence of the attested languages plus some reasonably straightforward assumptions. The scenario you are advocating (that all the _s_ in the Plural case endings go back to some Plural affix) is based on so many "ifs" that it can hardly be taken as useful. Again, as I had written, you may eventually turn out right, as did Democritus with his atomic theory, but both your and his ideas are nothing more than guesswork, based on insight but not on the discipline of mind, a quality that only makes the science possible.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> The reconstructions will only remain scientific if they don't dare to explain more than follows from the evidence of the attested languages plus some reasonably straightforward assumptions. The scenario you are advocating (that all the _s_ in the Plural case endings go back to some Plural affix) is based on so many "ifs"



My scenario is based on the improbability of a scenario in which 6 out of 7 plural case affixes  (I'm excluding the vocative pl. here) contain *-s, 5 out of 7 end in *-s, and yet these "s"s have disparate origins, rather than a shared origin in each case.

The fact that 2 out of 8 singular case affixes also contain *-s (which may also be of common origin in both cases), and the fact that *-s- is a stem formant in some pronouns, doesn't significantly detract from the improbability of the above coincidence, as far as I can see.

I'm open to being persuaded that this coincidence isn't really so improbable, but otherwise, I think the "ifs" entailed in my scenario are a reasonable price to pay, compared to the alternative.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> My scenario is based on the improbability of a scenario in which 6 out of 7 plural case affixes  (I'm excluding the vocative pl. here) contain *-s, 5 out of 7 end in *-s, and yet these "s"s have disparate origins, rather than a shared origin in each case.
> 
> The fact that 2 out of 8 singular case affixes also contain *-s (also possibly of common origin), and the fact that *-s- is a stem formant in some pronouns, doesn't significantly detract from the improbability of the above coincidence, as far as I can see.
> 
> I'm open to being persuaded that this coincidence isn't really so improbable, but otherwise, I think the "ifs" entailed in my scenario are a reasonable price to pay, compared to the alternative.


Then you can also consider the fact the verbal primary Active Pl. 1. and 2 endings may contain _-s_ in form of *_-mos~-mes_, e. g. Sanskrit _bharāmas, _Latin _ferimus_ or Doric_ φέρομες,_ and _*-tes, _e. g. Latin _fertis._ However, the situation here is even more intricate:

(1) The same endings may contain -_n_ (Attic _φέρομεν,_ Hittite _edueni_) or end on a vowel (Lithuanian _berame; _the Lithuanian final vowel comes from _*-ehₑ_ as evidenced by the preservation of the length in the reflexive forms: _vedamės_);

(2) In Pl. 2. _-s_ is only present in Latin in the Indicative (the Latin Imperative ends on -_te: ferte_): no other attested language, if I am not mistaken, has -_s_ in this form;

(3) The primary Active Du. 1 also may end on _-s,_ e. g. Sanskrit _bharāvas, _Gothic_ bairos;
_
(4) The primary Active Du. 2. may end on _-s _even when the Pl. 2 doesn't, cp. Sanskrit Du. 2 _bharathas_ vs. Pl. 2_ bharatha_ and Gothic Du. 2 _bairats_ vs. Pl. 2 _bairiþ: _in this connection I'd also like to mention once again that Gen. Du. ends on _-s (dvayos : dviejaus) _vs._ -m _in Gen. Pl. By the way, I am not aware of any positive evidence that this Gen. Pl. ending was originally used for the collective possession. What we have, is *_-es~-os~-s_ in Sg., *_-ou̯s_ in Du. (without ablaut) and _*-om_ (again without ablaut) in Pl.: if you prefer to postulate some semantic prehistory for the Gen. Pl. formant, then you have to do this for the Gen. Du. as well.​Concerning the pluralizing meaning of _-s:_ I think there may be some weak support to this idea in the development of the Dat./Abl./Instr. Du. ending attested in Indo-Iranic and Slavic — the Avestan ending is _-byā_ (occasionally -_byam_), the Old Persian is _-biyā,_ Old Indic has _-bhyām,_ Slavic has _-ma_ (<_*-mō~-mā_), which look formed by analogy: Nom. Pl. _-es_ : Dat./Abl. Pl. _-bʰos_ : Nom. Du. _-(e)hₑ_ → Dat./Abl. Du. _-bʰohₑ, _though it doesn't necessarily presuppose that for the speakers it was anything more than a simple extrapolation. Likewise, Old Lithuanian has _-ma_ for Dat./Instr. Pl. (see below) as well as _-mu_ for Dat. Du. and _-mi_ for Instr. Du., the latter two either formed by analogy with the Dat. Pl. _-mus_ and Instr. _-mis_ or ancient and continuing the old _*-bʰohₑ_ and *_-bʰihₑ_ formed in the same manner as in the Indo-Iranic and Slavic cases but with a separate Instr. Du. So, as you see, the languages were pretty active after the split of PIE, which hides the original picture.

As usual, there are problems. The Lithuanian _-ma_ may have originated from both _*-mo<*-bʰo_ (and then we will have *_-bʰo_ in the Du.) or *_-mā_ (the acute lengths shorten in the final syllables), the vowel in the latter coming from either _*ā_ (a normal development) or in a less likely case from *_ō_ (normal word-internally, but in the endings attested probably only in the thematic Gen. Sg. _-o<*ā<*ō<*-oet_). If the original vowel is _*ō,_ the the above scenario works OK. If the vowel is _*ā_ (and Slavic _-ma_ can come from here as well), then the assumption that the vowel was lengthened by _-hₑ_ is wrong (and the Indo-Iranic long vowels can come from _e~o_ plus any laryngeal).


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## Gavril

To your points 1 and 2: verbal subject plurality is not guaranteed to have the same form as noun plurality. Even pronoun plurality does not necessarily follow the form of regular nouns (cf. Finnish _*t*ämä_ (singular) vs. _*n*ämä _(plural), _m*inä*_ (sg.) vs. _m*e *_(pl.)). The variable use of -s in the plural verb suffixes of IE suggests an inconsistent generalization of nominal plural -s to these suffixes.

Points 3-4: the Gothic and Indic forms suggest that *-s was generalized from 1pl. to 1du., and then from 1du. to 2du., leaving 2pl. unaffected.

These explanations are not proven, but they are plausible, and again, the alternative explanation would entail that at least two (perhaps several) different *-_s_ have somehow found their way into all but one of the 7-8 plural noun cases.



ahvalj said:


> connection I'd also like to mention once again that Gen. Du. ends on _-s (dvayos : dviejaus) _vs._ -m _in Gen. Pl. By the way, I am not aware of any positive evidence that this Gen. Pl. ending was originally used for the collective possession.



The evidence (or the justification) for this idea is that otherwise, we would have to posit that "genitivity" was expressed in a radically different way in singular versus plural nouns, whereas e.g. accusativity would be compositional in the plural (accusative *_m _+ pluralizing *_s_). Also, you said in the post that spurred this discussion several days ago -- and to my knowledge, you're correct -- that no language group is known to use fundamentally different elements for the singular and plural case affixes, apart from IE (according to some people's interpretation of the evidence). Isn't it preferable, then, to look for ways in which IE can be brought within the normal spectrum of variation?

The principle here is not that IE must fall within this spectrum no matter what the evidence says, but rather that if plausible explanations can be found (and I think they can) which place IE within this spectrum, then they are preferable to explanations that insist on maintaining everything at a maximal level of intricate irregularity.



> if you prefer to postulate some semantic prehistory for the Gen. Pl. formant, then you have to do this for the Gen. Du. as well.



Why do I have to do this? The gen. du. appears to contain the same *-_s_ seen in the gen. singular, preceded by an *-_u-_ that is seen in other dual case forms (e.g. the nom./acc. of the numeral "two" is reconstructed as *_dwōu_).


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> My scenario is based on the improbability of a scenario in which 6 out of 7 plural case affixes  (I'm excluding the vocative pl. here) contain *-s, 5 out of 7 end in *-s, and yet these "s"s have disparate origins, rather than a shared origin in each case.


Let's consider the situation in modern Russian. Many masculine nouns of the _o_-declension have acquired the (always stressed) Nom. Pl. ending _-a,_ which, together with the Russian generalization of the _a_-declension endings for most Plural cases, has led to the rise of the following type:

"house"
Nom./Acc. Sg. _dom,_ Gen. Sg. _dóma,_ Dat. Sg. _dómu,_ Instr. Sg. _dómom,_ Loc. Sg. _dómʲe_
Nom./Acc. Pl. _domá,_ Gen. Pl. _domóv,_ Dat. Pl._ domám,_ Instr. Pl. _domámʲi,_ Loc. Pl. _domáx_

As you can see, this mirrors what you postulate for PIE: we find what looks like an agglutinative marker _-a-,_ to which in most cases (but Gen.) are added the endings: _-∅_ in Nom./Acc., _-m_ in Dat., _-mʲi_ in Instr. and _-x_ in Loc. We even find that the Gen. Sg. has the same ending as the Nom. Pl. (_-a,_ cp. the PIE *_-s_) and, moreover, the Dat. Pl. ending _-m_ can be compared with the Dat. Sg. ending _-mu_ found in the adjectives and some pronouns (cp. _*-bʰos_ and _*-bʰ-_ in _tibī, tebě_). If we wouldn't have known the origin of this system, some Gavril2 could have interpreted it exactly as you suggest for PIE. The ending -_ov_ then could have been called a formant originally denoting "collective possession".


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> As you can see, this mirrors what you postulate for PIE: we find what looks like an agglutinative marker _-a-,_ to which in most cases (but Gen.) are added the endings: _-∅_ in Nom./Acc., _-m_ in Dat., _-mʲi_ in Instr. and _-x_ in Loc. We even find that the Gen. Sg. has the same ending as the Nom. Pl. (_-a,_ cp. the PIE *_-s_) and, moreover, the Dat. Pl. ending _-m_ can be compared with the Dat. Sg. ending _-mu_ found in the adjectives and some pronouns (cp. _*-bʰos_ and _*-bʰ-_ in _tibī, tebě_). If we wouldn't have known the origin of this system, some Gavril2 could have interpreted it exactly as you suggest for PIE. The ending -_ov_ then could have been called a formant originally denoting "collective possession".



What would be so unreasonable about these hypotheses, if nouns of the _dom_-type were all the evidence we had?

If we found relevant evidence of previously-unknown IE declensions (parallel to the evidence of other Russian declension types besides _dom _in your example), I would gladly abandon (or at least cease to prefer) the hypotheses I have been discussing here.


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## ahvalj

Gavril said:


> To your points 1 and 2: verbal subject plurality is not guaranteed to have the same form as noun plurality. Even pronoun plurality does not necessarily follow the form of regular nouns (cf. Finnish _*t*ämä_ (singular) vs. _*n*ämä _(plural), _m*inä*_ (sg.) vs. _m*e *_(pl.)). The variable use of -s in the plural verb suffixes of IE suggests an inconsistent generalization of nominal plural -s to these suffixes.


I am trying to show that PIE is full of _-s_ found in various formants, of which you extract several nominal Pl. endings and ascribe to their _-s-_ a special meaning. Concerning the Uralic examples, PIE, aside of personal pronouns, doesn't know this opposition of separate Sg. and Pl. stems.



Gavril said:


> Points 3-4: the Gothic and Indic forms suggest that *-s was generalized from 1pl. to 1du., and then from 1du. to 2du., leaving 2pl. unaffected.
> 
> These explanations are not proven, but they are plausible, and again, the alternative explanation would entail that at least two (perhaps several) different *-_s_ have somehow found their way into all but one of the 7-8 plural noun cases.



I have tried to explain that the Instr. Pl. _*-bʰi(hₓ)s_ may have been the result of the merger of _*-bʰi_ with _*-i(hₓ)s_ (attested as a separate ending in Avestan), and thus may have inherited the final _-s _from the latter. This _-s_ then could have penetrated to the Dat./Abl. _-bʰos _in most languages, absolutely independently of the _-es_ in Nom./Voc. and Acc. Pl. There may be other explanations as well. The truth is that we simply don't know and have no ways to clarify the situation, so that a responsible researcher should stop where scholars did 150 years ago.



Gavril said:


> The evidence (or the justification) for this idea is that otherwise, we would have to posit that "genitivity" was expressed in a radically different way in singular versus plural nouns, whereas e.g. accusativity would be compositional in the plural (accusative *_m _+ pluralizing *_s_). Also, you said in the post that spurred this discussion several days ago -- and to my knowledge, you're correct -- that no language group is known to use fundamentally different elements for the singular and plural case affixes, apart from IE (according to some people's interpretation of the evidence). Isn't it preferable, then, to look for ways in which IE can be brought within the normal spectrum of variation?



The Pl. declension looks formed at a later period than the Sg. one, and it is probably not casual that Hittite doesn't have oblique cases in the Pl. other than the Gen. and Acc. The original Pl. cases could have been the ancestors of Nom. Pl. and Gen. Pl., whereas the Acc. Pl. could have formed when PIE shifted to the Accusative morphology from e. g. the Ergative type. Again, nobody knows and these discussions belong to the realm of speculations.



Gavril said:


> Why do I have to do this? The gen. du. appears to contain the same *-_s_ seen in the gen. singular, preceded by an *-_u-_ that is seen in other dual case forms (e.g. the nom./acc. of the numeral "two" is reconstructed as *_dwōu_).


_D(u)u̯ohₒu_ and _okʲtohₒu_ are the only two Nom./Acc. Du. where this _-u_ is attested outside Indo-Iranic, if I am not mistaken. Again, we don't know and have no ways to learn how it was in reality.


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## Gavril

ahvalj said:


> I am trying to show that PIE is full of _-s_ found in various formants,



OK, but the *-s seen in assorted plural and dual verb endings doesn't seem very likely to be distinct from nominal plural *-s.



> I have tried to explain that the Instr. Pl. _*-bʰi(hₓ)s_ may have been the result of the merger of _*-bʰi_ with _*-i(hₓ)s_ (attested as a separate ending in Avestan), and thus may have inherited the final _-s _from the latter. This _-s_ then could have penetrated to the Dat./Abl. _-bʰos _in most languages, absolutely independently of the _-es_ in Nom./Voc. and Acc. Pl. There may be other explanations as well. The truth is that we simply don't know and have no ways to clarify the situation, so that a responsible researcher should stop where scholars did 150 years ago.



You're right that the plural *-s didn't necessarily spread to all the case affixes at once: it might have crept from nom./acc. to one of the oblique affixes, and from there to other oblique affixes.

This could have happened before the plural and singular oblique suffixes became so differentiated from one another (with the *bH-suffixes occurring mainly in the plural, etc.), or as this differentiation was occurring. But, it seems improbable that all the pl. and singular case endings were already distinct (in the way that gen. sg. and gen. pl. are distinct in attested IE) when the *-_s_ ending started spreading.

Regardless, the point remains that the *-_s_ seen in all but one of the plural case affixes seems likely to be the same *-_s _(historically)_._



> The Pl. declension looks formed at a later period than the Sg. one, and it is probably not casual that Hittite doesn't have oblique cases in the Pl. other than the Gen. and Acc. The original Pl. cases could have been the ancestors of Nom. Pl. and Gen. Pl., whereas the Acc. Pl. could have formed when PIE shifted to the Accusative morphology from e. g. the Ergative type. Again, nobody knows and these discussions belong to the realm of speculations.



None of this removes the typological oddness (to my knowledge at least) of a scenario in which gen. pl. has no formal similarity to gen. sg., despite being simply a pluralization of the genitive case (rather than a semantically distinct case).

Unless we have evidence of an alternate source of genitive pl. *-_om_ (just as we have evidence in some IE languages of *-_bH- _appearing in singular and plural, even though many languages only have it in the plural), the hypothesis most in line with the existing data seems to be that *-_om_ was originally semantically different (beyond mere plurality) from singular *-_os_/*-_es_.


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