From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 6832
Date: 2001-03-28
>Somebody -- I think it may have been Eric Hamp,Yes.
>but I don't recall exactly where -- hypothesised that Cimmerian was a distinct branch of IE, characterised by a peculiar sound shift whereby the voiced aspirated series underwent devoicing and deaspiration (PIE *dH > *t) while the plain voiceless stops became voiced (PIE *t > *d; I forget what happened to the voiced unaspirated series). It was argued that a substrate with such a shift was detectable in Slavic (as unexpected voicing), and the ethnonym Kimmerio- was explained as something like *g^H[m]m-er-jo- (or maybe *-el-jo- if the Cimmerians rhotacised their l's) from *g^Hom- 'earth'. Pretty far-fetched, and to be taken with a very large pinch of salt, given that we have absolutely no historical documentation of _any_ Cimmerian words (except for a couple of Iranian-looking personal names). As for irregular voicing in Slavic, it may take place even in words borrowed or coined in recent times (thus quite often in the local dialect ofIn "Whose were the Tocharians?" (in: The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age
>Poznan) and is most frequent in expressive vocabulary (like Polish <pryskac'> 'spray' ~ <bryzgac'> 'splash').