Aspirate Interjections: [tied] Dacian - /H/ -> seems not possible

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 28098
Date: 2003-12-07

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" <alxmoeller@...> wrote:
> m_iacomi wrote:
> >> The amount of interjections which are not of Slavic origin
> >
> > ... is of no use since aspiration & vocalic yelling are always
> > naturally encountered in interjections and since /h/ was instated
> > as phoneme more than 11 centuries ago, there was plenty of time
> > to identify that aspiration with it at the level of Romanian.
>
> Well, it is of use if the same interjection is found in more IE
> languages. It is a crietrium for being an old IE interjection ,
mostly
> becoming a root for a family of words in actualy IE and New-IE
> languages.

Pokorny has only two roots in *h-, _ha ha_ and _ha:_. For
comparison, I took a look at list of interjections in Thai starting
in /h/ which, on phonological grounds, must have arisen in the past
700 years and are not regularly developed from other words in the
language and, similarly, cannot be loans from Sanskrit or Pali:

_ha H_ 1) 'yes', 2) ha! what!
_han M lo: R_ 'hello'
_ha:_ 1) 'sound made in laughter' 2) 'laugh'
_ha:_ H 'no!', 'ha!'
_hM_ H_ 'bah!', ha!
_hMj M_ 'haw!'
_hM:_ H 'sound made to show disapproval, boo'
_h&:y M_, _hE:_ M
'particle used at the end of a stanza or song'
_h&:y H_ 'hey, now then, hoy, hey there'
_hew H_ 'boo!
_h&: M_ 'bah, tut, tush, dear me, ah, oh'.
_ho:_ M 'loud sound of weeping'

Final M and H are tone indicators, M is the high back unrounded
vowel. While a few of them may be from English or French, the
general impact is to reinforce Marius's point about how
interjections with aspirates appear spontaneously once the language
allows aspirates.

(The phonological argument is that an old word beginning with /h/
must be in the low, falling or rising tone.)

Richard.