Re: [tied] Infixal /o/

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 16:51:12 +0100 (MET), Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
<jer@...> wrote:

>On Wed, 11 Feb 2004, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 01:31:35 +0000, elmeras2000 <jer@...> wrote:
>>
>> >There remain two quite embarrassing loose ends: (1) If /R/ was once
>> >just a phoneme of the language, we would expect it to appear in
>> >other material than just this one morpheme, but where are the
>> >examples? -
>>
>> I still feel the loc. du. ending comes closest to having the same
>> behaviour
>> as this */R/.  If we assume a formation parallel to the plural one, we
>> should have athematic *-X-u (pl. -S-u) and thematic *-oy-X-u (pl.
>> *-oy-S-u).  The thematic form could be expected to lose the laryngeal
>> (*-oyXu > *-oyyu, as indeed in Greek -oin < -oiin < -oiiun (< *-oyXu +
>> -m),
>> but in C-stems the laryngeal vocalised to /o/ (*-C-Xu > *-C-ou = Skt.
>> -o:(s), Av. -o:, OCS -u, Lith -au~), *not* to expected Skt /i/, Grk /o/,
>> rest /a/.
>
>That is one of those things about which I know that if I had proposed them
>I would get nobody's approval. Sure, *-u and *(-)o- look a bit alike, but
>are there other examples of such a correspondence?

In the above, I wasn't proposing any correspondence u ~ o, so I have no
idea what you mean.

>And does this lead to the
>understanding of the functional side that we want?

I was trying to address your loose end #1, which was explicitly not about
function but about phonology. I took the question to be: "is there
another, functionally different, case of a consonant which vocalizes to
/o/?". And the answer is yes, the oblique dual marker. We know it's a
consonant, because the thematic GL ending is -ayo:s in Sanskrit, with
closed-syllable short /a/, and we know it vocalizes to /o/. So what's
there not to be approved?


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...