Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper aims at discussing the chronology of Grassmann’s law (GL), bearing in mind the possibility, put forward by KIPARSKY (1973), of a backdating of its operativeness. Thanks to the comparison between some “relic” forms and data taken from 2nd millennium Greek, we will try to speculate in relation to the chronology of this phonetic change. In particular, the hypothesis here advanced is that we are dealing with different “waves” of a single phenomenon, whose effects were prolonged over time, surfacing sporadically in time and space.

Tocharian had a large number of demonstrative pronouns and determiners, whose basic element derives from the Proto-Indo-European gender-differentiated pronoun *so (masc.), *seh₂ (fem.), *tod (nt.) ‘this, that’. This article is chiefly concerned with the diachronic evolution of the endings and forms of these demonstratives, paying particular attention to the inflection of the feminine and the subsequent evolution of the category of gender.

The present article aims to reconsider in detail the original formulation of Grassmann’s law (GL), proposed by Grassmann (1863), since the main handbooks of Indo-European linguistics often repeat an extremely concise and sometimes incomplete formulation of the phenomenon without going into the details of Grassmann’s original reasoning, from which the definition of the phonetic “law” took its shape.