[tied] More prefixes. Was Re: Eggs from birds and swift horses

>
> By the way, the *s-mobile is not a prefix since a prefix last
> time I checked is a morpheme and a morpheme has meaning. Well,
> *s- has no meaning at all. It has never been found to have a
> morphological raison d'etre. Hence, my theory involving a
> more intimate Semitic influence than previously imagined: The
> seemingly redundant *s-, while having no use in IE, is in
> fact the causitive suffix in Semitic. Afterall, with multiple
> borrowings both with and without the Semitic causitive, Mid
> IE would have become replete with minimal verb pairs with or
> without *s-, and with similar meanings. Verbs such as *ter-
> and *ster- for example. Over time, it would be natural for
> the *s- to appear to IE speakers as redundant, optional or
> to be used perhaps when intensifying the action. We do this
> in different ways in English. I can think of "swing" versus
> "SHWING!". Perhaps that makes sh- a prefix in English?
>

I offered some time back some matching entries from Southern's book
on IE s-mobile and one of Møller's list of IE-Semitic matches. It was
shot down, rightly, since I hadn't ironed out the small differences
between the PIE forms the two posit. I can vouch for, however, that
they match in the sense that several of the einzelsprachlich IE
reflexes in both entries were identical. In that sense, approx. 80-
85% of the IE roots with s-mobile occurred on Møller's lists.
Therefore, the idea that IE s-mobile hails from Semitic, is sound.

Torsten