On 2006-02-01 18:37, tgpedersen wrote:
> Of?
The question is what, if anything, can underlie Germanic *-st-, Latin
and Greek -sp-, pre-Armenian *-ks- and Balto-Slavic *-k- in what seem to
be variants of the same word, namely *weXero- 'evening, west'? It's easy
to explain the Germanic reflex as former *-sp- assimilated to the *-st-
of *h2austero-. The rest of the puzzle, i.e. the variation of -sp-, -k-
and -ks-, can be solved by assuming an unusually complex cluster,
reduced in different ways in different IE dialects. The reconstruction
*-k(W)sp- preserves the linear order of the segments required by the
attested reflexes, and it so happens that *kWsep- 'darkness, night' is
reconstructible on the basis of Indo-Iranian, Hittite and Greek.
Piotr