Re: [tied] PIE dorsals

Miguel:

>Looking further towards the chapter on Anatolian in Ramat & Ramat (by
>Silvia Luraghi), I find HLuw. zurni- "horn"; HLuw azu(wa)- "horse"
>(Lyc. esbe), Lyc. s�ta "100 (1000?)", none of them explicable by the
>effect of neighbouring front vowels (and Luraghi further adds that *k
>before *i > zero in Luwian/Lycian, without examples).

Aren't these just examples of a later palatalisation again? Like say,
*k^ern- (> *zern- ?), *ek^wos (> *ezwa- ?), and *k^emtom (> *zenta ?)

>I'm not so sure *K's are as rare as all that. Just as an experiment,
>I counted almost half the Sanskrit entries starting with k- (the ka-
>and ka:-'s, as a matter of fact) in the index to IEW, for a total of
>175 words and morphemes. 19 of them were only referred to from
>outside the *k/*k^ or *kw pages. 30 were referred to from the *kw
>pages, 126 from the *k/*k^ pages. That's four times as many *k-'s as
>*kw-'s. I counted 117 Sanskrit forms starting with s'a-/s'a:-.

Erh, shouldn't that be: 126 of _*k and *k^ COMBINED_ are four times as many
as the *kw-'s?? Isn't that what Piotr said, Miguel? By the way, why is there
only *k/*k^ pages? Shouldn't *k and *k^ have their own seperate pages if
they are truely distinct phonemes? :)

>Even if the *k-set contains more loanwords, onomatopoeia and >Pokornian
>mistakes than the *k^ and *kw sets (which might be true), >all it shows is
>that the unnatural "gap" in the unmarked member (if >due to a phonological
>event in pre-PIE) tended to be filled with >borrowings and onomatopoeic
>formations (I'll leave Pokorny out of >this), just as we would expect (the
>same happened with the *b gap).

Indeed. May we also note that IE *b doesn't exist either.

>What is Meillet's (or Kortlandt's) explanation for the position >before
>non-syllabic *u (*k^u- vs. *ku- [vs. *kw-])? Without an >original *k^ ~ *k
>opposition, the reflexes in the different languages >become totally
>incomprehensible (they're difficult enough *with* *k ~ >*k^).

Oh god, not *k^wo:n (or *k^uo:n) again. This is palatalisation followed by
unstressed front vowel to zero. Originally, the *k^ is to derive from
earlier *k.

- gLeN

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