Indo-Iranian 'one' (was: beyond langauges)

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

> That's true. Strictly speaking we must either assume either
>
> 1) that the Proto-IIr word was *aika and assume that Iranian replaced
> that with aiwa, or

Actually the evidence (see, for example,
http://www.zompist.com/numbers.shtml ) gives us Proto-IIr *aiwa- if we
accept Nuristani as an independent branch, and the consensus is that
the Proto-IIr form was *aiwa-.

> 2) we must interject a common ancestor to Indo-Aryan and the Mitanni
> glosses, in which the word was aika, as you point out

Ahem! Try Proto-Indo-Aryan. FWIW, Dardic also appears to show *aika-.

> Mostly for practical reasons, linguist have chose option 1), since it
> seems like a lot of terminological trouble to define a new stage to
> accommodate a few few words in Mitanni. It's true that that entails
> elevating aika to the status of proto-IIr, although we have no way of
> determining whether that's true, whether it was PIIr *aika or *aiwa.

Richard.