Re: Prenasalization, not ejectives cause of Winter's law?

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

>
> On 2006-09-23 11:00, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > How do you know those adjectives are not part of a Caland system
> > and thus not particularly loyal to their *-u?
>
> "Being part of a Caland system" means, essentially, that if an
> adjective in *-ró- occurs in a compound as its the first member,
> *-i- is substituted for *-ró-, as in YAv. xruui-drau- (*kruh2-i-)
> 'having a bloody club' vs. xru:ra- 'bloody' (*kruh2-ró-) or
> Gk. argi-kéraunos 'with swift/vivid lightning' vs. argós <
> *h2r.g^-(r)ó- (Skt. r.jrá-) 'swift, shining'. There are good
> reasons to believe that this "substitution" has a purely phonetic
> explanation. The alternation of *-ró- and *-ú- if free-standing
> adjectives seems to be due to the preferential survival --
> dependent on phonetic factors -- of doublet forms of ultimately
> the same origin (sometimes both survive, in cases like *h2r.g^-ró-
> ~ *h2r.g^-ú-, *bHr.g^H-ró- ~ *bHr.g^H-ú-, each pair sharing one
> and the same Caland alternant). These are principled alternations.

I assume you mean by that some alternations are unprincipled? I am
not sure I get it.

> What they certainly don't mean is that you are free to go
> ahead and ignore the suffix if you so please.

What a horrible idea. Has someone proposed that?

On the subject: Oettinger observes with glee on p. 164 after having
served an instance and half from Hittite (tepu ~ tepnuzzi, skt.
*dabhu- dabhnóti) that the theory that adjectives in -u and verbs
in -nu belong together is now vindicated. On p. 165 he mentions
that Benveniste wants to connect skt. dabhra- with Hittite tepu-.
So: -u-, -ro-, did I miss anything?

> Derivatives with a nasal infix were only formed from athematic
> bases, which in the case of adjectives means the *-u- variant.
>

> Apart from *-neu- factitives there's also good comparative
> evidence for other types of *CR-ne-C- presents of *CeRC- roots.
> For example, *demh2- 'conquer, tame' had a nasal present
> *dm.néh2-ti whose direct reflexes are finely preserved in Greek
> and Celtic.

*dm.néh2-ti, *dmnh2é-nti ?

But the existence of an n-infix (here analogical?) does not
prove that it participated in the verbal nu-suffix.


Torsten