--- In cybalist@..., "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@..., "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...>
> wrote:
> > --- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
> > wrote:
> > > it would be nice if we could demonstrate that *mr- (and perhaps
*ml-) survived in Germanic till after Grimm's Law to become *br-, *bl-
(phonetically [Br-, Bl-]). Any etymologies worth reexamining?
> > Possible ml > bl:
> > Could Latin blatera:re, blati:re 'blabber' and Old Norse
blaðra 'talk nonsense' be related to one another and more distantly
to the *mloi root seen in Slavonic mle^sk- and Sanskrit mlecchati (
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/8294 )? It seems a
long shot - the root extension is different - /t/ v. /i/, and there
is a high risk of these forms simply being onomatopoeic.
> Falk & Torp:
> Pladder (Da. mud; empty talk)
> vb. pladre "talk empty talk", early Da. "slosh"
>
> + Sw. and MLGerm.
>
> Gk. pHlázo:, papHlázo: "speaks indistinctly"
>
> Question: should it be *ml- > *bl-, *bHl- or *pl- ?
It could just be ml- > bl- at different times. Someone remarked that
ml- > bl- could easily be a sporadic change. If it happened in pre-
Germanic before Grimm's law, then afterwards it would look like ml- >
pl-. Piotr did wonder whether that would have happened. And, of
course, under the Glottalic hypothesis, [ml] > [bl] in PIE is what
one would normally write as ml > bHl.
What are the possible precusors of Greek /z/ in pHlazo:? I fear we
may be looking at an onomatopoeic cluster rather than various
derivatives of a root *mlat or *mlot. The connections with *mloi are
looking weaker. I think we are looking at the sort of vocabulary
items where 'phonosemantic' effects are significant. I would welcome
an expert opinion on how related these words are.
Richard.