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. sñta "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).
I'll deal with these in a separate posting. they may be worth a separate
thread.
>What Thracian and Phrygian (and the second hand information on Illyrian:
centum or satem?) seem to show is that the palato-velars were maintained as such
(without assibilating) until classical times, judging by spellings such as Gord-
and Zord- (/g^ord-/?).
I don't think Thracian and Phrygian (or Armenian
and Phrygian) were closely related. Judging from onomastic evidence, Thracian
was fully Satemic (it also shared some features with Albanian and the languages
of Northern Europe, e.g. *sr- > *str-). Examples of Phrygian sibilants from
IE dorsals are found before front vowels (zeuman < *g^heu-mn 'fountain',
etc.) but not elsewhere, which shows that Phrygian was no more Satemic than
French is.
>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:-.
>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).
Certainly. And the process went on for three
thousand years or more, generating new *k-words and strengthening the incidence
of the unmarked phoneme until it rose to the level observable in Sanskrit. I'm
sure you realise that counting Sanskrit entries tells you something about the
relative frequency of "new" and "old" k in (Old) Indic but is not a good
approach to estimating the relative frequency of dorsal types in PIE. Note
also the methodological bias: any Sanskrit word referred to from the *kW pages
is likely to be securely attested (*kW guarantees that a Kentum cognate has been
identified), while a large proportion of the *k etymologies are likely to be
less rigorously controlled if not outright *kuku.
The PIE state of things can be assessed more
reliably by inspecting more-or-less complete inventories of
uncontroversial etymologies compiled for some common semantic fields, preferably
in a work less antiquarian that Pokorny's dictionary. Many such lists can be
found e.g. in Mallory and Adams (EIEC). If numbers and animals are not enough,
take anything else, e.g. body parts:
(a) *k^reh2- 'head', *g^enu 'knee', *g^Hesr
'hand', *bHa:g^u- 'arm' *h1orgHi- 'testicle', *dng^Huh2- 'tongue', *k^erd-
'heart', *smek^-/*smok^wr 'chin/beard', ...
(b) *(h)okW- 'eye', *jekWr(t) 'liver' *(h)nogWH-
'nail' (fewer examples but all of good quality).
(c) *K is only found in *krep- 'body' (in
a "blocking" environment), *pokso- 'side' (which seems to have actually
been *pog^-so-, judging from some plausible cognates cited in EIEC),
*kok^-so/sah2- 'hollow of a major joint' (dissimilation possible) and a handful
of obscure items like *gutr (Lat. 'throat', Hitt. 'nape'), *twek- (?) 'skin'
(Gk., Skt., Hitt.?) and *gHelun-ah2- 'lip' (or rather Gk. 'lip', ON 'jaws', Arm.
'palate'). You could say that they outnumber the *KW-words, but to say so is to
ignore the fact that they are also far less reliable.
As usual, *k^ is robustly attested, *kW is
significantly rarer but securely evidenced, and *k is by and large restricted to
"fringe" vocabulary.
>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^).
Why not *kw- : *kWw- (reduced *kWeu-) > *k^w-
: *kw-? In some cases we may be dealing with a split. Slavic has the
mysterious alternation *sw-/*gw- (*svist-/*gvizd- 'whistle', *svEtja/*gvEzda
'candle/star'), which suggests that expressive voicing was incompatible with
satemisation (East and South Slavic *zv- in such words is secondary and dates
back to the "second palatalisation"). The Satem opposition *k^w-/*kw- is
rare and each example had better be considered on its own right.
Piotr