Re: [tied] Olsen's Law [was: PIE Ploughs]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:

> According to Jens, the root *poh3- is actually *poh3i- (with possible
> contextual variants *poh3-, *poih3-, *pih3-, *ph3i-), so I was wondering
> whether the possibility has been investigated that the different
> treatment
> depends not (only?) on the quality of the laryngeal, but (also?) on the
> presence/absence of this *i in the root.  Just a thought.

It has, and the semivowel has no part in it. Still, I have assumed
preaspiration even before lost /H2w/ in IE *térthro-m, Gk. térthrom
'summit' from older *térH2w-tro-m. But that also just skips the semivowel.

> >I'm not sure whose idea it was originally. Something of the kind was
> >certainly advocated by Kurylowicz (that's probably where Watkins had
> >it from). The problem is that we don't find *dH where expected -- but
> >then, Olsen's Law can be interpreted as a PIE precursor of
> >Bartholomae's Law. It's very much the same thing -- aspiration by
> >progressive assimilation.
>
> I was thinking whether there was a way to combine Bartholomae's law (with
> its effect /t/ > /dh/) with Olsen's preaspiration law to explain the
> result
> /d/ in Slavic. 

I may be biased, but why does this have to be assigned to Bartholomae if
he did not write about it? The Slavic -dl- is not restricted to aspirating
contexts.

Jens