From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 14405
Date: 2002-08-20
----- Original Message -----From: richardwordinghamSent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 11:25 AMSubject: [tied] Re:P & Q, and -pt- & -kt-> Surely Albanian <natë> 'night' shows the development of IE -k^t-, which I would not expect to be like Latin /-kt-/ as late as the Roman Empire. What happened to the cluster with 'plain' (uvular?) /k/, or indeed /kW/, or indeed -kt- developed internally after satemisation?The "night" root is *nekWt-, actually, so your question has already been answered. But for the sake of completeness, medial *kWt and *k^t both end up as /t/ in Albanian. A good example of *k^t > t is the first <t> in <tetë> '8' from *ok^to:-t-. By contrast, in Romanian nocte- > noapte (cf. lucta- 'combat' > Alb. luftë).
> Is there any evidence that Latin /-kt-/ > Balkan Latin /-pt-/ was not a substrate-induced substitution comparable to the occasional (reverse!) change /-pt-/ > /-kt-/ (e.g. Latin capti:vus > French chétif, English caitiff) in Gallo-Romance?What sort of evidence could that be? I simply don't know why Latin -kt-, -ks-, -Nn- (see below) became -pt-, -ps-, -mn- in that variety. At any rate, we can't blame all phonological change (no matter how odd) on substratal influence. Even languages practically devoid of _any_ historical substrate (such as Icelandic or most of the Polynesian languages) go on changing, sometimes in rather strange ways.> (How relevant is the parallel development of the cluster -mn- from -gn-, as in Latin lignum 'wood'? I'm sorry I can't remember the Rumanian word - it's twenty years since I last saw a discussion of this particular change, which was in the context of selecting matrices of distinctive features to define phonemes.)
It's <lemn>. The change is part of the same pattern, since Latin <gn> was in all likelihood pronounced <Nn>.Piotr