印欧語人称代名詞の語根について

Abstract

Concerning radices of personal pronouns, though we can identify three different radices, *wei-, *mes- and *ne, it has been difficult to determine from a comparison of languages belonging to the Indo-european language family their exact meaning owing to the complicated distribution of these radices among singular, dual or plural forms of 1st and 2nd persons. Even in the same person and the same number, the nominative case often uses a quite different radix as compared with other oblique cases. However, if we take into consideration the hypothesis, rendered by G.A.Klimov, that Indo-european languages developed from the stage of the active language directly into the accusative language stage and that nominative case corresponds to the active case of the latter, it may be possible to surmise that *mes-, *ne are proper to the 1st person plural, with the exception that the former inherited the active case and the latter the absolute case of the active language stage, because while *mes- appears only in nominative plural, *ne- appears also in dual but never in the nominative case. On the contrary, *wei- can appear in the nominative case of the 1st person dual and all cases of 2nd person dual and plural. If we take into consideration the circumstances that it is used in all cases of the 2nd person dual and plural and surmise that this radix originally meant 2nd person plural, it may be quite understandable that it could be used in nominatve dual of the 1st person since that speaker may, according to circumstances, consider the hearer as co-actor of his action.