Re: S mobile

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 52364
Date: 2008-02-05

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:

Piotr wrote:
>> In the Wiki article there are some erroneous claims like *sneigWH-
being
>> a root with "s mobile", which it isn't. The *s- is missing only in
those
>> languages which regularly lose it before nasals (like Latin and Greek).

> Not so sure.
>
> What about Mordvin low "snow" < *n_(gh)w ? (vowel unclear)
> No s- because it is Uralic..

In which case Uralic may fall into the category of 'languages which
regularly lose it befroe nasals'.

> And connection with Chinese *ning "to freeze, to congeal" ?
> These words have no #s-.

What's the Old Chinese reconstruction? The character (U+51DD)
represents Mandarin _ning2_, Cantonese _jing4_ _king4_ (not sure I
understand the table entry here that I'm using), Tang _ngieng_ ('e' =
schwa) and Vietnamese _ngung_.

Moreover, Old Chinese s- dropped from clusters without affecting the
tone on the way to several dialects, including Mandarin.

Personally, however, I'm very dubious of any connection of either of
these words with the PIE word. I could be persuaded of a connection
between the Chinese word and 'Tibeto-Burman' *glang ~ *glak ~ *grang ~
*klak ~ *m-klak 'cold', with some forms also meaning 'freeze', though
it's not the most obvious of connections. (The last two allofams are
cited by Matisoff with a final superscript 'H' - I don't remember its
significance.)

Richard.