From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 17119
Date: 2002-12-11
----- Original Message -----
From: <richard.wordingham@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 11:04 AM
Subject: [tied] Words versus Roots (was Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?)
> This is roughly the problem I was thinking of. Problems arise when the none of the attested formations is obviously ancestral. An example is the word for 'red'. The stem is *h1reudH- (unless Greek misleads us about the laryngeal), but what was _the_ word?
*h1reudH- is a root rather than a stem. If you know the _stem_, you know how it was declined and fully derived and inflected _words_ can be generated easily. Adjectives often had more than one stem variand under the so-called Caland system; besides, it is quite likely that PIE had at least two (and perhaps more) adjectives based on this root: *h1roudHo- and *h1rudHro- (cf. English red, ruddy and rusty, not synonymous to be sure, but all potential colour words). Take you pick when writing PIE tales.
Piotr