From: tgpedersen@...
Message: 7935
Date: 2001-07-18
> ----- Original Message -----German
> From: tgpedersen@...
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 10:48 AM
> Subject: [tied] *H1wes-
>
> from EIEC
> *H1wes- "moist, especially of the ground or plants"
> vestikatu "to offer libation" Umbrian
> wo:s "juice, broth" Old English
> waas "layer of mist of fine drops" New Dutch
> wasal "moist ground" Old High
> vasa "forest with wet ground and blue clay" Latvianthe
> ievasa "moisture, tree sap" Latvian
> va:s "trouble, difficulty"
> (< "caused by bad weather") Old Norse
>
> What is that laryngeal H1 doing there? And how do you account for
> long vowels?
>
> Torsten
--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> A good question. There quite a few "wet" lexemes beginning with *w-
and there have been attempts (started by van Langehove 1939, I think)
to combine them in a single word-family by reconstructig the
"underlying root" **h1ew- with various extensions and suffixes, e.g.
*h1w-ed- (better known as *wed-), *h1w-er-s-, *h1w-es-, *h1w-eh1-r-,
etc., despite the fact that the initial *h1- is nowhere to be seen in
most cases (only *h1wers- seems defensible). I personally dislike
this automatic habit of inserting a laryngeal wherever convenient for
preconceived reasons, even if there's no comparative justification
for one. The Germanic long vowel here (Modern English ooze is another
example) is not explained by the initial laryngeal. The root, to tell
the truth, is rather shakily attested and I'd brand it with a
cautionary question mark.
>
> Piotr
>
>
I wonder how you discovered my cleverly disguised intention of
uniting the wet *w-'s. You must be psychic or something.
Anyway, the reason was that Møller posits for *u:r- etc a root
approx. *w-H-r-, and since he occasionly lets H's (laryngeals) wander
in and out of roots ny means of metathesis, a term I find employed
often in the Hamito-Semitic Encyclopedic Dictionary by Orël &
Stolbova (but sometimes it just comes and goes in the same root
without them being much alarmed by it), I thought metathesis (if the
use of that term is permissible in PIE) would solve the problem of
getting rid of the -H- in Møller's *w-H-r- on my way to *w- unity
(perhaps EIEC just parked the H1 outside of the root so that it was
ready for being metathesized(?) into position in case of vowel
lengthening?).
Torsten