Re: [tied] Re: *gwistis

Dear friends,

not to quibble, but Alb. gisht has the dialect variant glisht which makes
one suspicious of any connection with ON kvistr and Welsh bys. Still, the
meaning 'finger' is striking: hypercorrect dialect-to-dialect loan? The
point made by Piotr about gW being inadmissible as against gw which is
entirely possible, is certainly correct and important.

Jens

On Thu, 19 Sep 2002, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

> I didn't even check it in Pokorny, assuming that *gw- was self-evident
> (*gWi- would have had to yield Alb. zi-). To illustrate the (relatively
> late) loss of *w in this combination, cf. gjeth(e) 'leaf' (originally a
> collective of *gath < *gwosdos, meaning something like 'foliage,
> thicket', cf. Slavic *gvozdU 'young forest'). Albanian gisht- could
> reflect *gwist- or *gweist-. A strange omission on Pokorny's part.
>
> Piotr
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Richard Wordingham
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 2:26 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: *gwistis
>
>
> --- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
> wrote:
> <Snip>
> > As for the absence of palatalisation, the reconstruction *gwist-
> assumes an initial cluster (*g + *w), NOT a labiovelar, and the
> expected reflex of *gwi- in Albanian is <gi->.
>
> Actually I was being sloppy. I hadn't realised that PIE had a
> three-way _word-initial_ contrast gW v. gw v. g^w, spelt gw v. gv v.
> g'v in http://flaez.ch/cgi-bin/pok.pl . Pokorny reconstructs gW, but
> based only on Celtic and Germanic forms, which don't distinguish the
> three initials. If PIE *gwistis > Albanian gisht is correct, you have
> refined the reconstruction to *gwistis (Cybalistic) / *gvistis
> (Flaezian).
>