ISSN 1012-9286 TOCHARIAN AND INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES VOLUME 6 1993 REYKJAVIKDouglas Q. Adams The Ending of the Second Person Plural in Osco-Umbrian and Tocharian Warren Cowgill, in one of the last articles to come from his pen (1987), convincingly demonstrated that the Umbrian verb forms couortuso and benuso are second person plurals of the future perfect, and not third person singular impersonals (< *couortusor, *benusor) as supposed by Buck (1928) or second person singular deponents as supposed by Nussbaum (1973).! At least at the level of phonological surface structure we have, then, a second person plural ending -so (probably from *-sa though the shape of the final vowel is not the center of our concern?). While we have no data on the first person (singular or plural) the rest of the future perfect paradigm in a shallow underlying form would be -ws-s (2nd sg.), -us-t (3rd sg.), -us-s@ (2nd pl.), -us-ent (3rd pl.). These give, with rhotacization of intervocalic -s-, degemination (graphic only) of intervocalic -ss-, and other regular changes: -us, -ust, -uso, -urent. This second person plural -sa of the future perfect is matched by a second person plural imperative in -1@, e.g. etato/etatu (Cowgill, 1987:82-84). Seeking to unite -s@ and -1a@, Cowgill takes the future perfect -uso to be the regular phonological outcome of an earlier -wstd, thereby uniting the impe- tative and non-imperative forms of the second person plural. The relationship between imperative -1d and (future perfect) -ussd (< *-ustd) is paralleled for Cowgill in the Paelignian (Northern Oscan) imperative -te (eite ‘go!’) and perfect lexe (= légistis), which in his analysis reflects an earlier *leg-is-te. The acknowledged weakness of Cowgill’s proposal (1987:87) is the necessity of assuming a change of *-st- to -ss-3 in Umbrian and Paelignian, in 1 For earlier discussions of this Umbrian ending see von Planta, 1892-1897 II, 389ff. and Nussbaum, 1973:366, fn. 17. ? By regular phonological change and/or orthographical practice a final <-o> in Umbrian can reflect earlier or underlying -d, -or, -om, -Om, -um, or presumably -o (of the latter there are no actual examples). > Cowgill actually assumes a half long -s-- rather than -ss- as the outcome. Thus it is written -s- and does not undergo rhotacization. Whatever its exact phonetics, it must surely~30- the face of evidence that inherited *-st- remains as such (e.g. the third person singular of the future perfect -ust (if the latter reflects *-us-ti), the Oscan passive comparascuster, Umbrian pustnaiaf). The difficulty is even greater, however, than Cowgill states, if the *-st- that becomes -ss- in the future perfect is in Proto-Italic terms *-ser- instead. Though Cowgill is not explicit about the type of formation to be seen in the Osco-Umbrian future perfect, the concensus would seem to be that it is thematic, thus *-us-es, *-us-et, *-us-e1@ (2), *-us-ent, rather than athematic.* We should note, too, that the *leg-is-re reconstructed as underlying Paelignian lexe would be the only place in Osco- Umbrian where perfects of the type -is- were preserved.5 These considerations lead me to somewhat different conclusions than Cowgill’s. I do not think that the -sV seen in the second person plural in Umbrian and Paelignian reflects an old *-stV, where the -1V is actually the marker of the second person plural, but rather that these languages give evidence that Italic at least had a secord person plural marker of the shape -sV along side of one of the shape -1V. Certainly such an assumption immediately removes the phonological difficulties of Cowgill’s explanation, though of course at the cost of complicating the morphology by the addition of another second person plural desinence. However, the presence of a second person plural ending -sV in these Italic languages may remove from its isolation the formally similar second person plural ending -sd of the Tocharian preterite and imperative, e.g. Tocharian B rdnkas ‘you ascended’ or pydmtso ‘do, make (pl.)’ where both -s and -so are regular reflexes of an underlying -sd (and the -t- of pyamtso is regularly epenthetic). The origin of the Tocharian ending has not been established. Van Windekens (1982:283-5), after a discussion of previous attempts, takes the Tocharian -s to be from a PIE *-st seen further extended in Hittite -Steni and Latin -sris. Few I think would follow him in such a construction. My own previous best guess (Adams, 1988:100, fn. 12) as to the origin of the Tocharian ending was that we had here an original preterite have been -ss- phonemically, written, as is more often the case than not, particularly in documents written in the Latin alphabet, with a single -s-. “So for example Buck, 1928:169, 173, Jasanoff, 1991:85-86; though Nussbaum, 1973:368, specifically opts for an athematic paradigm. 5 Reconstructing a simple sigmatic *leg-s-te would not help here since Osco-Umbrian shows no other trace of this formation either.-31- ending *-stesi, much as in Latin -stis. Such an ending would have regularly given *-s'c'dsd > *-s'c'sd > *-ssd > -s(a). Against such a hypothesis, however, lies the fact that in Pre- or Proto- Tocharian there was a facultative loss of absolute final *-i in certain grammatical morphemes, including the primary personal endings, much as occurred in the history of both Italic and Celtic (Adams, 1993). Thus beside *-1i there was *-, beside *-nti there was *-nt. Obstruents made final by this change were subsequently lost. Tocharian B seems everywhere to have gener- alized the shorter version of the person/number endings, while Tocharian A typically generalized the longer ones. Thus the first person plural in Tocharian B is -md < *-mes but in A it is -mds < *-mesi. Thus, if there was a *.stesi, it should have become *-stes in Tocharian B and it would regularly have given an attested *-. (the Tocharian A development could still have been as sketched in 1988). I am persuaded then that the Tocharian ending, like the Italic counterpart, must reflect an earlier *-sV, rather than some combination including *-st-. It seems to me that there are three possible PIE formations that might have given rise to the Italic and Tocharian second person plural endings: (1) that we have a stem formative (or stem formative plus old ending) that has been reinterpreted as an ending (as, say, the -n in oxen), (2) that we have here an otherwise unknown PIE personal ending (possibly dual rather than plural), (3) that we have a combination of an old ending, now lost, plus some sort of particle. The third possibility seems least likely. The only known ending that might be of help to us here is the second person plural of the perfect *-e* and the only particle that has the right shape is *sém ‘together.’ However, a PIE *.e-sém, when added to a Tocharian preterite stem such as prek- ‘asked’ should have resulted in **presds. The lack of palatalization of the stem-final consonant might easily be analogical in origin but I see no reason for -s rather than -s. In Italic too the ending would have to have undergone drastic and not well motivated reshaping. At first glance the second solution, whereby we assume an otherwise unknown personal ending in Proto-Indo-European, seems at least as unlikely. The personal endings seem pretty well-plowed territory. However, a second © Auested only in Indo-Iranian, but surely old. See Watkins, 1969:35.ae person dual *-se might be located in the perfect. As is well known, the endings of the perfect are in general quite distinct from those of the present and aorist. Of the endings of the singular and plural, only that of the first person plural is the same as the one found in the Present and aorist. Thus it would not be too odd if the forms of the personal endings in the dual were different from those found in the present and aorist too. Admittedly, in the only two Indo- European groups that preserve the Perfect as a form distinct from the aorist, namely Indo-Iranian and Greek, the forms of the perfect dual are either the same as those of the present and aorist (Greek) or clearly modeled on them (Indo-Iranian), Since in the latter case the perfect dual endings are clearly newly formed and idiosyncratic to Indo-Iranian, our usual evidence for the shape of the perfect dual endings in Proto-Indo-European rests essentially with Greek. It would not be too terribly surprising if the Present/aorist dual endings had been mechanically extended to the Perfect, just as the Present/aorist ending of the second person plural has. Indeed, the evidence from Indo-Iranian might almost be said to support such a conclusion since, if the well-attested present/aorist dual endings had also originally been found in the perfect (as is the situation in Greek), one can see no reason why they would have been replaced, only in the perfect, by a new set of endings which are obviously based on those of the present/aorist. However, when all is said and done there is no direct evidence of a form *-se in the perfect dual. Probably the best solution is to see this ending as the reanalysis of the aorist *-s- plus the perfect second singular *-e as a unitary ending *-se.7 It is significant that both I-E groups that show this ending show conflation of the PIE perfect and aorist endings and abundant examples of preterites descended from PIE s-aorists. Paelignian shows the original *-se in an untransformed state. The Oscan -sd is modeled after the -12 of the imperative whose origin is probably, as Cowgill suggests, a dual form. Since there is no palatalization in the Tocharian form, the synchronically underlying -sd@ must reflect a PIE *-s'om or the like, just as the corresponding mediopassive -td reflects *-dhw'om beside *-dhwe (cf. Sanskrit primary -dhve and secondary -dhvam). is Schmidt's solution (1985:91, fn. 157) for Tocharian. He does not discuss the Italic endings.Douglas Q. Adams Department of English University of Idaho Moscow, Idaho 83843-34- Bibliography Adams, Douglas Q. 1988 Tocharian Historical Phonology and Morphology. (American Oriental Series, 71.) New Haven, American Oriental Society. 1993 “Revisiting the Person-Number Endings of Tocharian B.” Tocharian and Indo-European Studies 6:15-28. Buck, Carl Darling 1928 A Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian. 2nd ed. Boston, Ginn and Company. Cowgill, Warren 1987 “The Second Plural of the Umbrian Verb.” In Festschrift for Henry Hoenigswald, pp. 81-90, edd. George Cardona and Norman H. Zide. Tibingen, Gunter Narr, Jasanoff, Jay H. 1991 “The Origin of the Italic Imperfect Subjunctive.” Historische Sprachforschung 104:84-105. Nussbaum, Alan J. 1973 “Benuso, couortuso, and the Archetype of Tab. Ig. 1 and VI- Vila.” Journal of Indo-European Studies 1:356-369. Schmidt, Gernot 1985 “Lateinisch amavi, amdsti und ihre indogermanische Grundlage.” Glotta 63:52-92. Van Windekens, Albert J. 1982 Le tokharien confronté avec les autres langues indo-européennes, Vol Il, 2: La morphologie verbale. Louvain, Centre International de Dialectologie Générale. von Planta, R. 1892-1897 Grammatik der oskisch-umbrischen Dialekte. 2 vols. Strassburg, Triibner. Watkins, Calvert 1969 Indogermanische Grammatik, Band III: Formenlehre, Erster Teil: Geschichte der indogermanischen Verbalflexion. Heidel- berg, Carl Winter.