Re: Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> On Sun, 8 Dec 2002 13:19:54 -0800 (PST), Juha Savolainen
> <juhavs@...> wrote:
>
>
> >In the same group, plus the
> >remaining Indo-Aryan languages, we see the "preterital
> >augment" (Greek e-phere, Sanskrit a-bharat, "he/she/it
> >carried"). Does this mean that the said languages
> >formed a single branch after the disintegration of PIE
> >unity for some time, before fragmenting into the
> >presently distinct languages?
>
> There are at least two possibilities:
>
> 1) The augment was present in PIE, and it was lost everywhere but in
> Greek, Armenian, Phrygian, Indo-Iranian. In this case the augment

is

> not a shared innovation, and has no value for the purpose of this
> discussion.
>
> 2) The augment is a joint innovation of the above mentioned groups
> (plus perhaps Balto-Slavic, judging by a trace of the augment in the
> Slavic past tense of the verb "to be" b-e^). In that case, the
> development of the augment is a shared innovation, and it's

certainly

> significant that teh groups having it are more or less contiguous.
>

My knowledge of Celtic comes frim a "Gaelic without Groans" I once
bought plus what I understood of Holger Pedersen's "Linguistics in
the 19th century". Still I have a question.
It seems at least present Scotch Gaelic forms some past tenses by
leniting the initial vowel (b -> bh etc). At the same time lenition
in genereal is supposed to have been caused by the consonant in
question being placed at one time between two vowels. Although I read
somewhere that there was another canonical theory of the cause of
lenition in Scotch Gaelic past tense, I still wondered: may it have
been caused by the e-augment sandwiching the consonant with the
following stem-vowel, which, if true, would mean that Celtic once had
that e-augment?

Torsten