From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 15821
Date: 2002-09-30
>[MQV:]Why MQV? My first last name start with a velar stop, not a uvular one :-)
>> >I'm being guided by the observation that the vast majority of languagesSemitic has hV- and it has ?V-, so it applies (more so because Semitic shares
>> have
>> >words beginning with V- (with or without automatic glottal stop ?V-) as
>> well as
>> >hV-, if they have /h/ at all. A matter of common sense. In practice,
>> since the
>> >matter is mostly unknowable (barring considerations of a Nostratic
>> nature), I'm
>> >perfectly happy to adopt an algebraic position and use the symbol *h1.'
>
>I do not think this applies to Semitic, at least it is not what I always
>hear, not being anything near an expert on any kind of it myself.
>[MQV:]The inference that these roots began with *h1-, I presume.
>> Put differently: Hittite zero-grade forms like as-, ad- (*&1s-, *&1d-)
>> force me
>> to accept that PIE had no words starting with a vowel, but they do not
>> force me
>> to accept something as unnatural as that the initial phoneme in all such
>> cases
>> was /h-/.
>
>I do not see how Hitt. as-, ad- can force one to any such inference.
>If laryngeals not adjacent to syllabics were realized with a minisculeBut this all assumes *h1, so the inference is correct.
>prop-vowel which took the shade of the laryngeal itself (as we see in the
>three prothetic vowels in Greek), then all we need to get the Hitt.
>reflexes out of *H1s-, *H1d- is a change of the prop-vowel to something
>written in a way that makes us transcribe it as <a>, and then of course
>loss of the consonantal *H1 as always.
>[MQV:]I was talking about *h1t, not *h2t. OK, let's make that: "and I accept
>> I accept that PIE had a /h/ (since it had /bh/, /dh/ etc.), and I accept
>> that in
>> cases like *h1t > *th, *h1 must have been /h/. On the other hand, in a
>> form
>> like *h1wih1k^m.tih1, I'm willing to bet that the first two *h1's were
>> surely
>> [?], not [h], and I suspect the last one was [ç] (that's three, and I'll
>> stop
>> here).
>
>Some of the cases of -Ht- > -th- actually have -H2- which is then found to
>aspirate to both sides. So the statement that such a thing *must* be /h/
>is false for (at least) one of them.
>As long as the case story of 'twenty' is not parallelled byThe point is that /d/ > /?/ is a more likely development than /d/ > /h/
>anything really resembling it, it remains a case story and, being a
>numeral, may quite well be a spontaneous event with no claim on the status
>of regularity. All I see is lack of the initial *d-, which is not so
>strange since the second part has /dk^-/ underlyingly. We are yet to find
>a rule replacing the second -d- with simple length, but that is a separate
>problem encountered with all decades.
>I am not quite sure whether theI analyze it as *dwi- (the compound form of "2") > *h1wi-, followed by
>first part is in the stem-form of *dwo-, which in compounds always
>surfaces as *dwi-, or is instead inflected in concord with the final
>ntr.du. with an ending *-iH1 - or both for that matter. Since
>*(d)wi-(d)k^mt- and *(d)wi-iH1-(d)k^mt- equally yield einzelsprachlich
>*wi:k^m.t-, I see no way of really knowing. Still, if Greek /ewi:k-/
>points to *H1wi-, as I am quite willing to believe, then the first part
>was most probably inflected; for that would give *dwi-iH1-dk^mt-iH1, in
>which the initial could then be not only dissimilated (against the second
>-d- while it was still there), but also assimilated, a series of events
>that would account fully for the resulting PIE *H1wi-iH1-(d)k^m.t-iH1. I
>find it very strange that you take the two last laryngeals to be
>originally different: to me they are the same morpheme in concord: "two
>tens".