On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, P&G wrote:
> > Unfortunately there is no evidence from Osc.-Umb. to decide if
> >Lachmann's Law applied to that branch also. ...I know of no such
> evidence.
> Is Umbrian >rehte evidence to you?
>
> Umbrian shows both REHTE and TETTOM < *tehto- *< tekto-. We would expect
> the spelling TEITTOM if the vowel were long. See Meiser "Historische
> Laut-
> und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache" section 149.5.
>
> I note your comments on fesnaf-e "commonly derived from *dheH1s-naH2-".
> Which alphabet was this written in?
Dear Peter and list,
Yes, Meiser says so, but can he really know? REHTE (3x) and FESNA- are in
the Estruscan alphabet, while tettom-e (2x) is in Latin letters, all from
the IgT. In his Umbrian phonology from 1986, Meiser gives up on tettom-e,
being specially perplexed by the doubling of the t ("Eine Erklärung für
die abweichende Behandlung ist schwer zu geben", p. 274 with a footnote
reporting suggestions of its being a Latin loanword; judging by the index
the word is only mentioned this one time in the book. Otherwise /HT/ is
taken to represent length + t, most often etymologically from velar + t
(he reads REHTE with [-e:t-], sometimes from labial + t, but often as
inverse spelling for old long vowel + t (Meiser Umbr. 92). I don't see any
final clarification in this.
But even if REHTE and tettom-e do reflect Italic short *-ekt-, the Latin
forms can still be accounted for by restitution in a time *after* the
separation from Sabellic, but *before* the special Latin coalescence of
-bh-, -dh- with -b-, -d- between vowels. There is ample time for this to
happen.
Jens