Linguistica Brunensia (Nov 2015)
Pronominal declension in Altaic languages
Abstract
This article gives a summary of the pronominal declension in the five branches of the Altaic lan-guages (till the present time it was not realized at least in any individual branch), reconstructs pro-nominal declension for the daughter protolanguages, and then compares these protosystems. The final result is an attempt to reconstruct the Altaic pronominal protosystem. One can conclude that the personal pronouns in the daughter branches of the Altaic (macro-)family preserve one specific common feature: the opposition of a direct case (nominative) with a base for the oblique cases char-acterized by a nasal extension. Only this extended pronominal stem forms the basis for the case end-ings proper. An internal analysis of these and external comparisons demonstrate that they represent practically the same case markers as in the nominal declension (cf. Blažek – Schwarz2014).When projecting this system into the Altaic protolanguage, it remains an open question whether the different forms of the direct (nominative) and oblique cases in the 1st person sg., namely *(e)bi : *minoin our reconstruction, reflect the primary suppletion or whether they may be derived from a common denominator. Traditionally m- in the 1st person has been explained through na-sal assimilation under the influence of the following -n, but comparably legitimate is the idea of a secondary denasalization *mV > *bVin the monosyllabic morpheme with a final vowel. Prelimi-narily we conclude that this suppletion was functional already on the Proto-Altaic level and only a deeper comparison with the reconstructed protolanguages of Northern Eurasia can confirm the origin of the whole paradigm in one root, both from a genetic perspective (the Nostratic hypothesis of Illič-Svityč; Dolgopolsky) or from an areal perspective (cf. e.g. Doerfer, Vovin).
