Re: [tied] The "Mother" Problem

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:

> Well, stress retraction is expected if there is a full (non-high)
> vowel in the first syllable, as in *bHráh2t(o)r-. The same should
> have happened in *máh2t(o)r- as opposed to *ph2tér- and *dHugh2tér-
> . On the other hand, analogical levelling between 'father'
> and 'mother' (not extending to 'brother') would have been a
> natural process, so the end-stress of Indic and pre-Vernerian
> Germanic may be secondary, and the initial stress of Greek
> phonologically regular.

How is "stress retraction [to be] expected if there is a full (non-
high) vowel in the first syllable"? If that were the case, it seems
to me that we should see *péxte:r instead of *pxté:r.

Was there a root in IE *mex- meaning 'nourish' or something similar?

> But why is there a full vowel in the 'mother' and 'brother' in the
> first place? *m.h2ter- and *bHr.h2ter- don't violate any PIE >

phonotactics, and the proportional equation *(p)a(p)pa- : *(m)a(m)ma-

> :: ph2ter- : X would have produced *mh2ter-, wouldn't it? Perhaps
> some kind of contrastive reinforcement was employed here, in order
> to preserve the relationship between the Lallwort and its formal
> counterpart (*m.h2tér --> *máh2tor-). 'Brother' is harder to
> explain, since I don't think anything like *bHra- (with an initial
> cluster!) is likely to be an IE nursery word (no offence meant to
> modern Jamaicans). My feeling is that the word was once more
> slightly complex than it appears to be, and that some kind of
> compositional simplification occurred in it.

It seems to me that both *méxte:r and *bhréxte:r were recent
developments within IE. If those words had been "coined" when pitch-
accent was still distinctive(*), we would have seen either *mxté:r
and *bhrxté:r or *méxto:r and *bhréxto:r. In other words, the
atonic /e:/ means that the pitch-accent was no longer distinctive.

I also hypothesize that the suffix *-xter is a reanalysis of the
word *pxté:r from **p(e)x-tér- to **p(e)-xtér-. Once the meaning
changed from "protector" or "provider" to "father", it could be
extended to other kinship terms. An interesting related question is
this: in nomina agentis, was the nom. sg. originally *-térs, like in
*pxté:r (< *pxtérs), at least in animate nouns?

Finally, I propose that the word for "brother" comes from the root
*bher- "carry": *bhr-xter-. Perhaps the older form of the word was
*bhrtérs "a (fellow?) carrier".

- Rob