Piotr:
>It's probably the same process but with different chronological
>layers. A-colouring by *h2 is so consistent in all branches that dating it
>to PIE must be regarded as the most economic hypothesis.
Yes. Okay, cool. [gLeNny reads on...]
>A-colouring by the *k-series, on the other hand, is sporadic and shows
>traces of post-PIE lexical diffusion, with different
>results in different branches.
Are there instances of *qe (traditional *ke) in IE then? In
what way is it "sporadic"? The way I see it is if there are no
instances of reconstructable *e next to *q or other uvular stops,
it's consistent enough to be PIE.
>Of course there are also people who don't believe in the *k^/*k
>contrast in the first place (such was also my view until
>discussions on this forum convinced me that there was irreducible
>evidence for *k [q] as a separate phoneme).
I've denied worse in the past :)
20. *k^am- (or *k^m-?)
25. *mad-
27. *labh-
28. *rabh-
I would attribute the previous to some rule on voiced bilabial
phonemes delabializing *o to *a. (Or rather that *a resisted
becoming *o beside neighbouring *m, *b or *bH in early Late IE.)
1. *g^hans-
2. *nas-
3. *daiwer-
6. *g^hais-
8. *dans-
9. *dak^-
10. *dai-
11. *dhai-
12. *k^ad-
14. *k^ad-
26. *pan-
30. *swad-
31. *tau-
33. *wastu-
These may be caused by vocalic laryngeals becoming pure vowels
(ie: *-h- > *e, *-x- > *a) or hidden laryngeals. With *nas-,
for example, I've wondered if it could be linked to *xanh-
"breathe" + *-s-. Thus, a zero-grade *xnhs- > *xnes- >
*(x)nas-. Conceivably, *dhai- could be from earlier *dxai-
for all we know. Perhaps *swad- < *swx-d-.
By the way, before anybody gets on my case about those syllabic
rules that cause a zero-graded *swaxd- to become *suxd- instead
of *swxd- in reconstructed IE, let me explain that I think early
Late IE had slightly different rules on syllabics such that a
syllabic laryngeal could once have arose in those instances.
- gLeN
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