Re: [tied] Water, pre/postpositions, somewhat OT

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> On Wed, 02 Jun 2004 10:06:22 +0000, tgpedersen
> <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> >> >Aha. Maybe an early loan from PIE *p-g- "pole; catch"
> >>
> >> No. An early loan would have given *Vg-
> >
> >Yes, following the rules as given by M. Vidal for Pre-Pre-Basque.

A

> >loan into Pre-Basque (Roman times, and earlier?) would give *bVg-

. An

> >IE dialect that weakened stops in inlaut might have *pVG-. A loan
> >from that into Basque might give *bVh-.
>
> *p-, *t- and *k- disappeared in Basque before Roman times.
> Loans from Latin have b-, d- and g- for p-, t- and k-, but
> earlier loans (from Celtic) have t- > 0-, k- > 0- [no p-, of
> course].

They are of courese loans from that famous IE dialect which had p-,
t-, k- > 0. No, but seriously, could you counter such a claim? What
specifically Celtic is there about those loans?

>This suggests that the loss happened *just* before
> the Roman period (Celtic loans are affected by the loss,
> Roman loans aren't). So normally, your proposed "early loan
> from PIE" would have had to take place no earlier than the
> Roman period, which is a problem, because PIE didn't exist
> anymore at that time, and the only loanwords to be adopted
> by Basque as of the Roman period until teh modern era were
> Latin (and later Romance) words.
>

NB if they're Celtic.

> Of course *p- might in principle be an exception. There is
> no Celtic material to show what happened with it, and it's
> quite likely that the loss of *p- in Basque was earlier than
> the loss of *t- and *k- (in which case it would be an areal
> feature shared with Celtic): when protected in the position
> at the beginning of a verbal root, Basque maintains *t-
> (e.g. e-torr-i) and *k- (e.g. e-karr-i) [and *d-], but there
> are no verbal roots starting in *p- (i-pin-i is the only
> exception, but the *p- is not original, coming from *bVh-).
>

I should perhaps remind you and myself that the *(H-)bh/p/m-r/l-
"river, etc" complex already has a p/bh alternation (stress-induced
Verner-like, says Møller); if need be, I can always claim "behe" was
loaned with its initial b- from whatever the donor language was. The
thing that interested me about <ipini> was the uncommon stop
alternation, which it shared with <ibai>/<ibar>/<ipar> set. That
normally indicates "loanword", as does the latter's connection with
the limited set of "plurals" in -ar (the loanword status of which
set has been proposed already, says Trask).

Torsten