Jens:
>I see no reason at all for the root's having -o- in
>*p�nt-o:H2-s, *pn.t-H2-�s other than the mere fact
>that a root must have *some* vowel timbre, and why >would /o/ be excluded?
So... why is *o so odd in this form, other than that
it doesn't conform to your unbending mathematical
theory? I see the sweat on your brow as you continue
at great pains to deny the archaicy of the *o-grade
with layer after layer of unintuitive sound changes.
Concerning *wodr:
>I left that out too to avoid provoking the wolves.
>[...] If the weak cases have -e-, we have to
>depart from long -e:-; to get that to have o-timbre
>can be handled by lengthening, and, hurrah, the old >collective marker *-H2
>lengthens.
So much complexity, all simply to avoid accepting
that *o was a true vowel in Pre-IE, different from
*e (and its laryngealized form *a)! Rather than be
straight forward with MIE *wat:en/*wet:enase, you
feel the need to employ any linguistic oddities
like "extra-long vowels" to reduce PreIE to *e but
this makes as much sense as hammering a square peg
into a circular hole.
>The presence of the collective marker is confirmed
>quite strongly by Skt. �sthi 'bone', which has -o-
>in most languages, but also shows -a- (Welsh as 'rib', asgwrn 'bone'), and
>so, again, must be based
>on *-e:- [...]
Rubbish. The "bone" word has *o in most languages,
as you say, so accept it and move on! The form in *x-
(a uvular) has a variant form in uvular *q- (which is
the original form, perhaps even a loan. Note: Akkadian
qasit.u "bow"). The form with the uvular stop shows
that the vowel could not have been *e since *k, *g
and *gh only became uvular next to Mid IE *a (> *o).
The very source of the *k^/*k contrast lies in the
opposition of *e and *o that you attempt to theorize
away without much success.
>That is why I chose to treat /s/ as a phonological
>category of its own, a strategy that proved quite
>justified by the facts I found.
So... do you mean that the difference between *Ceis-
and *Ceug- involves syllable boundaries? What exactly
are you saying here? What phonological category are
you speaking of? How does this relate to the perceived
difference in the root forms above?
>The syllabification of the retained -R-'s [...]
>Now, in *pRrh2mn�H2, [...]
>In a comparable derivative from a light root, as
>*kRr-m(n)-�-z, [...]
Okay, I'm trying to be patient but this really looks
like ridiculous pseudo-linguistics at this point.
Again, I fail to see why the causitive must be very
ancient. This is the fatal assumption I see here that
causes this wild and fruitless speculation about a
phoneme **R that happens to have no definable
qualities whatsoever.
- gLeN
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