Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!MathWorks.Com!yeshua.marcam.com!charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu!csusac!csus.edu!netcom.com!alderson
From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: 4th, 5th declension in Latin
In-Reply-To: studboy@minerva.cis.yale.edu's message of 10 Oct 1994 20:45:43 GMT
Message-ID: <aldersonCxIqyM.Ar5@netcom.com>
Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com
Fcc: /u52/alderson/postings
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <37c95n$ho6@news.ycc.yale.edu>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 1994 17:23:09 GMT
Lines: 29

In article <37c95n$ho6@news.ycc.yale.edu> studboy@minerva.cis.yale.edu
(Chris S Karas) writes:

>Has anyone ever heard that the fourth and fifth declensions in Latin may have
>been derived from the third?  Can anyone give me a reference?

It's rather more complex than that:  The third declension is a conflation of
Indo-European consonant stems and i-stems, while the fourth is a continuation
of IE u-stems (with some interference from the third).  The fifth declension is
a Latin innovation.

Greek shows the same sort of conflation, with consonant, i- and u-stems al
being considered third declension (without a fourth or fifth), although i- and
u-stems have enough peculiarities that they are treated separately, as sub-
types of the third.

A fairly accessible discussion can be found in Buck's _Comparative Grammar of
Greek and Latin_.  If you read French, Meillet's comparison of Greek and Latin
should help, and you could also try Pedersen's _La cinquie`me de'clinaison
latine_.

(I'm sending this by mail, although I think folks who post requests for
information should stick around for a couple of weeks to see what they might
find out.)
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
