Re: [tied] Re: Lexicon of Proto-Indo-European morphological roots

On Sun, 01 Apr 2007 14:12:25 -0000, Jens Elmegård Rasmussen
<elme@...> wrote:

>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
><miguelc@...> wrote:
>
>> >Ringe's _From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic_ (OUP, 2006);
>this
>> >particular chapter is available online as a PDF:
>>
>> The following paragraph caught my eye:
>>
>> A laryngeal which was separated from an o-grade vowel by a
>> sonorant, but was in the same syllable as the o-grade vowel,
>> was dropped (cf. Beekes 1969: 74-6, 238-42, 254-5). For
>> instance, whereas the laryngeal of *dheh1- "put" survived in
>> the derived noun *dhóh1mos "thing put" (cf. Gk. tho:mós
>> "heap" and OE do:m "judgment", both with long vowels that
>> reveal the prior presence of a laryngeal), that of *terh1-
>> "bore" was dropped in *tórmos "borehole" (cf. Gk tórmos
>> "socket" and OE þearm "intestine"). The most important
>> application of this rule was in the thematic optative, in
>> which the sequence */-o-yh1-/ was reduced to *-oy- in most
>> forms.
>
>Thanks, Miguel, for showing us this. It is of course outrageous.
>Hasn't anybody really understood the message of the o-infix theory?

Apparently not. For instance, H. Craig Melchert ("Anatolian
Historical Phonology") discusses "Saussure's Law" (pp.
49-51) at reasonable length without mentioning the o-infix
hypothesis even once. Most of the discussion is about HRo-

> Ro-, but his two examples of -oRH- > -oR- in Hittite are

kalmara- "ray, beam" < *k^olh2mo-ro- and palwa:(i)- "to
clap", interpreted as a denominative verb from a noun
*pol2weh2-. At first sight, those two, being thematic
derivatives, seem to to conform to the restriction that "The
laryngeal-deleting vocalism is not *just any o*, but *only*
the particular kind of /o/ that emerges from an earlier
infixed consonant (which was still earlier a prefix) ..."

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
miguelc@...